As local search and local advertising continue to pick up steam, you may want to ensure your website can be found for geographic searches. That's where geo-tagging (or geo-coding) comes in handy. Geo-tagging is a way to add geographical meta data to virtually any content: photos, RSS feeds, or websites. A geo-tag essentially defines the longitude and latitude, the location place name or a regional identifier.

Why is Geo-tagging important? By placing a geo-tag on a Web page, website, or RSS feed, you provide information to your readers and to search engines about the geographical location of the site. It can also refer to the location that the page or photo is about. So if you wrote an article about the Grand Canyon in Arizona, you could tag it with a geo-tag indicating that.

How can you add geo-tags (and geographic metadata) to your website? To add geo-tags to your site, you must first know the latitude and longitude of your location. Since you probably don't fancy yourself a cartographer by trade, there are several geo tag generators to help you on your way. Take this geo-tag generator for example. Simply enter your complete address and the proper meta-tags are provided to you for placement in your page headers.

Here is what was returned for Website Magazine's address:

<meta name="geo.region" content="US-IL" />
<meta name="geo.placename" content="Des Plaines" />
<meta name="geo.position" content="42.008491;-87.899666" />
<meta name="ICBM" content="42.008491, -87.899666" />