I was looking up the newest microformats for the latest SEO tips, specifically geo location, since geo location helps search engines with a particular content relevance score, mainly an organization or structure’s location.  Helpful info, it’s probably becoming even more relevant for search localization.

Obviously, if you are in Rapid City, SD looking for a donut shop, it’s much easier to discover the best donut shop there, Jerry’s Cakes and Donuts (by the way, Jerry’s, your website is truly awful!) as opposed to some other donut shop like that place called Dunkin Donuts, that for some strange reason doesn’t have a location in Rapid City South Dakota, nor anywhere in South Dakota for that matter.

I’m shelling out a lot of free advice in this post, but gee, Dunkin’s do you think maybe there’s a market for people who like coffee and donuts in South Dakota?!  You might want to do some market research there.

Here’s the gist about meta geotags from Wiki:

ICBM method

The GeoURL^[9] standard requires the ICBM tag^[10] method which is used to geotag standard web pages in HTML format:

<meta name="ICBM" content="50.167958, -97.133185">

The similar Geo Tag format allows the addition of placename and region tags:

<meta name="geo.position" content="30.167958;-87.133185">
<meta name="geo.placename" content="ABC Rural Municipality, Sample, Canada">
<meta name="geo.region" content="ca-mb">

RDF feeds

The RDF method is defined by W3 Group and presents the information in RDF tags:^[11]

<rdf:RDF xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#" xmlns:geo="http://www.w3.org/2003/01/geo/wgs84_pos#"> <geo:Point> <geo:lat>35.701</geo:lat> <geo:long>22.552</geo:long> </geo:Point> </rdf:RDF>

Microformat

According to the latest microformat documentation, the Geo microformat allows coordinates within HyperText Markup Language pages to be marked up in such a way that they can be “discovered”.  An example of such HTML tags looks like this in your page body:

<span class="geo">
<span class="latitude">50.167958</span>
<span class="longitude">-97.133185</span>
</span>

and it will likely display on screen like this:

I was surprised to see HTML 5 doesn’t already incorporate data-longitude and data-latitude as an attribute now, but that would be too clean and easy, nothing like a bunch of really smart web people making things more complicated than they need to be (which isn’t very smart, I’d like to point out.)

Also, I found out that there is a proposal to extend Geo to cover other bodies, such as Venus and the Moon.  Now that’s planning ahead.  I only hope we get how to properly geotag all of earth properly first.

The Wiki page also cites Flickr as an example of providing geographic data for any geotagged photo in any of the formats mentioned above.  I only found out from a co-worker weeks ago that Flickr’s still around.