Thursday, November 20, 2008

What is Geolocation - How to use Geolocation

Geolocation is defined by serving / targeting different content to users based on their locations. We can determine users location based on their information set on cookies, IP, the information they provide during their login session. The only notable point here is Google again presses the RED button and saying treat the Google bot and users as same. i.e, serve the same content to both users and Google bot.
Why Geolocation: Say you have an ecommerce site sells products on sports good. You target world wide customers. Using geolocation, you can serve the web content in their language which would help you as well as customers.

Ways to set GeoLocation:
1. Country specific Domains (CTLDs) – Having a country specific domain would help much better for geo location when you have a single unique target audience. Say for example you have a business in France and you need your business to reach people only in France, a wise decision would be going for a CTL Domain. (http://www.domain.fr/)

2. Using Google Webmaster Tool: When you have a .com domain for your business and you are targeting audience in France. In this case you can set the geo location as France using Google Webmaster Tool. Dashboard >> Tools >> Set Geo Location.

3. Also keep in mind when you have a country specific domain (http://www.domain.fr/). The above said option would be disabled automatically in Google webmaster tools. On the other hand we can say Google would automatically set the geo location to France.

4. Using Meta Language Tag: Using Meta Language Tag would be another option to inform search engines about the language of your website. This helps search engines to display your sites in appropriate countries.

Ø meta http-equiv="content-language" content="fr". This informs search engine bots that youe website is having only French content.

Ø meta http-equiv="content-language" content="fr, en" This informs search engines bots that your website has both French and English content to be displayed.

5. Using IP for geo location: Serving different content based on their IPs since often IP address helps us to determine the where about of the user. This also knows as IP Delivery. As name differed it doesn’t have different definition. It’s just a specific type of geolocation. The best example would be when you open http://www.google.com/ it automatically redirects to different location based on your IP (County). Say for example, http://www.google.com.au/ or http://www.google.co.in/. Yahoo also into IP Delivery now.

Any more ideas or suggestions, please share it in comment section.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Detailed explanation! Keep up the good work. Hope to see more good postz like this!

Cheers!
Davis

Mercy said...

@Davis - Thanks for stopping up and making a comment.

Unknown said...

Very interesting read.

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