Where on Earth is your Web Site? by Robert K. McCourty
You've just finished congratulating your marketing team. After
six months of concentrated effort you can now actually find your
own company web site within the search engines. Everyone is busy
handshaking and back patting when a voice from the back of the
room rises above the din. "Yeah this is great! Can't wait until
we can find ourselves on wireless devices." All conversation
comes to an abrupt halt. Eyes widen. Everyone turns to the
fresh-faced intern standing in the corner with a can of V8 juice
in one hand and a PALM device in the other. You, being the
Department Manager, barely managing to control your voice not to
mention your temper, ask the now nearly frozen with panic
intern, "What do you mean find ourselves on wireless? We just
spent thousands on our web site visibility campaign!" "Well...
Explains the sheepish intern, "There is no GPS or GIS locational
data within our source code. Without it, most wireless
appliances won't be able to access our site."
Guess what? The intern is absolutely correct. Anyone interested
in selling goods and services via the Internet will soon be
required to have some form Geographic Location data coded into
your web pages. There are approximately 200 satellites currently
orbiting the Earth. (even Nasa won't confirm the exact number)
Some are in geosynchronous or geostationary orbit 27,000 miles
above your head. The Global Positioning System (GPS) is the name
given to the mechanism of providing satellite ephemerides
("orbits") data to the general public, under the auspices of the
International Earth Rotation Service Terrestrial Reference Frame
(ITRF). Sounds like Star Wars doesn't it? It's pretty close. The
NAVSTAR GPS system is a satellite-based radio-navigation system
developed and operated by the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD).
The NAVSTAR system permits land, sea, and airborne users to
determine their three-dimensional position, velocity, 24 hours a
day, in all weather, anywhere in the world, with amazing
precision. http://igscb.jpl.nasa.gov/
Wireless devices, WAP, Cellular, SATphones and a whole host of
newly emerging appliances and indeed, new software applications,
will all utilize some form of GPS or more likely GIS data
retrieval. GIS stand for Geographic Information System and
relies on exact Latitude and Longitude coordinates for location
purposes. Several car manufacturers currently utilize GPS for
on-board driver assistance and the Marine and Trucking
Industries have been using it for years. Obviously your web site
is a stable beast. It sits on a server somewhere and doesn't
move much, so at first glance it seems quite unplausible you'll
need GIS Locational Data within your source code. On the
contrary. One aspect your web site represents is your business's
physical location(s) and if people are going to try to find your
services and products, shouldn't you at the very least, tell
them where it is and how to get there?
Let's look at it from the other end of the spectrum. The end
user approach. Let's say you're vacationing in a new city for
the first time. Once you get settled into your Hotel room,
what's the first thing you want to find? Restaurants? Bank
machines? Stores? So you pull out your hand-held, wireless,
device, log onto the web and search for "Italian Food in San
Francisco." Five Hundred results come back so you click the new
"location" feature on your hand-held (which knows exactly where
you are) and ten Italian restaurants, who were smart enough to
code their web sites with GIS data, light up on the screen.
Guess which restaurants didn't get selected? The other four
hundred and ninety. Starting to get the picture?
How does this affect you and your web site marketing? GIS
Latitude and Longitude co-ordinates will soon be a must have on
every web site operators and web developer's list and an
absolute necessity for anyone wishing to trade good and services
via the Internet. This data may relate to the physical location
of the web site or where the site is being served from (if
applicable) or where the actual business represented by the site
is physically located. There may be multiple web site locations
and coding involved, if for example, you have a franchise with
multiple locations, each location will probably need a page of
it's own with the correct corresponding location data. If you
run a home-based business, I doubt if the co-ordinates to your
living room are going to be necessary, but you should provide
the latitude and longitude of the closest city or town. Large
corporations such as banks may want to code the exact location
of every automated teller machine across the country. Industry
standards and the methods of serving out this data are still in
the development phases but it's a safe bet to assume there are
plenty of people working on the solutions right now and given
the speed of technology, implementation will probably be much
sooner than later. Give yourself an edge. Find out where in the
world your web site is...before your web site is nowhere to be
found.
About the author:
Robert McCourty is a founding partner and the Marketing Director
of Metamend Software and Design Ltd., a cutting edge search
engine optimization (SEO) and web site promotion and marketing
company. Scores of Metamend Client web sites rank near or on top
of the search engines for their respective search terms.
http://www.metamend.com/
