GEO-TAG

HTML Geo Tag Informator (1/2)

Learn more about the Meaning and Purpose of HTML Geo-Tags:

or browse the description of geo-tag formats ...


What are HTML Geo-Tags?

To answer this question, we first should clarify what html meta-tags are. Well, meta-tags are additional labels in the header of a html page, containing information which is not visible for the visitor of the web page. Meta-tags supplement the web page with metadata that are designed to be read by machines (e.g. search robots). The most common html meta tags are: "author", "description" and "keywords". And this is the way meta tags look like in the html code:

<meta name="author" content="Helmut Karger" />

And now let's have a closer look at geo-tags. Html geo tags are meta tags, that provide information about the geographical location of the web page. They inform search robots where the web page is located.

What are Geo-Tags for?

According to a survey of The Kelsey Group (Princeton, NJ, USA) from the year 2004, 25% of all commercial online searches are local searches. It understandably makes little sense to look for a baker and find one who has his shop in a completely different town. Today search engines are already able to handle regional search requests, gathering city and street names from the text content of the explored web pages. Geo tags will simplify this task since they provide machine-readable information about country, region and exact latitude/longitude coordinates.

Creating Geo-Tags

The Geo Tag Generator will help you to create your own geo tags in a simple interactive way without having to deal with latitude or longitude degrees or the syntax of meta tags.

The easiest way to start is using the address search function above the map window. By march 2007 street level search is available for the following countries: Australia, Austria, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, New Zealand, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United States. If there is no result for your complete address, then try the combination: "city, country" or only the country name.

After a successful address search many of the fields listed below should already be filled correctly. But you may modify them if you want to. At the same time the map window is showing the found place. Zoom in (+) and switch to the satellite view to see more details in the map and use the mouse to drag the marker to the accurate position (or just click at a new position).

To protect your privacy, you have the possibility to reduce the accuracy of the latitude and longitude values by reducing the number of digits after the decimal point. Just select your desired degree of accuracy - the default value is maximum precision.

The "Dublin Core Title Tag" is not a html geo tag. However it will be read out by database sites that store geo-referenced websites in their index. Optionally you may have generated this tag here, if you want to. The "DC.title" meta tag is nothing else but the title of your webpage which you already may have included in a "title" statement in the header section of your page. Let the generator create an empty "DC.title" tag, if you want to fill it with a copy of your title statement later in your html editor.

Transfer Geocode into your Html Page

With completed input fields and the marker at the right position, click into the code area. The entire code is now marked and you can copy it to the clipboard (right mouse button and copy or Ctrl-C). Then open your web page in your html editor and paste the code into the header section (between <head> und </head>). This can be done per menu with "edit" and "paste" or with a simple Ctrl-V. In case of using a wysiwyg html editor make sure to switch to "source code view" before pasting, otherwise you won't get the header area displayed. If you're using a content management system (CMS) or blogging software, then insert the geo tag code into the page template.

Mark your Web Page as "Geocoded"

As already mentioned, geotags like all html metatags are invisible to your website visitors. If you want to show that your web page is geocoded, www.geo-tag.de provides three different icons to embed into your html page. Simply insert the corresponding code fragment into the body section of your web page. If you prefer to store the image file on your own server, feel free to copy it but don't forget to adapt the html code (img src=...) correspondingly.


This page contains geo-tags  
This page is geo-coded  
This page is geo-coded  

Or better, copy the image file to your own server and adapt the HTML code (img src=...) to match.


Read more about the format of geo-tags ...


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