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Where on earth is your web
site at? Now it's more important than ever to be
able to access your website from everywhere, with
customers from California to England to China to
Brasil. But how do you know if your web site even
downloads quickly on the other side of the world.
Some web site monitoring companies have monitoring
stations around the globe, and they can tell you
how your web site is performing...and warn you when
it is not. |
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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/
articles@metamend.com |
