Address Tag and SEO – Complete HTML Reference Guide for SEO
Tags: address tag, SEO
While I could not find any case studies/research in the SEO industry regarding the effects of the <address> tag on search engine rankings, I am of the opinion that when it comes to the SEO game, you shouldn’t leave things in fate’s hands. Therefore I recommend using this tag, especially on local SEO efforts.
Using the <address> tag will deliver a strong message to search engines about your business location. The address tag will also help with the semantic structure of your web documents, and will (hopefully) differentiate important content (for local SEO this means the address) from noise .
Usage
The <address> tag defines the contact information for the author or owner of a document or website, allowing the reader to contact them . The address element is usually added to the header or footer of a webpage. The html usage is similar to:
<address>
Pitstop Media Inc. – Our Surrey, BC Office Address <br />
202A, 8322 130th Surrey, BC V3M1Y3, Canada<br />
Phone: +1(778) 218 2665
Email: <a href=”mailto:asdfghj@pitstopmedia.com”>asdfghj@pitstopmedia.com</a><br />
</address>
For more information on optional and standard attributes of <address> tag please visit the HTML <address> tag page (http://www.w3schools.com/tags/tag_address.asp).
What designers should know about the use of the address tag for SEO
- The new design trends for footers (as of June 2010) use a 4 or 5 column layout. This makes footers the ideal place for displaying the address information.
- Try to provide all the information related to a location (street address, phone number, fax number and so on).
- Use pure text to display the physical address. Do not embed the address in images – search engine robots don’t read images as humans do.
- At the least, make sure that the Contact Us pages contain this tag.
- CSS will help, but keep in mind that elements grouped with <div> have no semantic value unless they’re assigned to a class or ID. Don’t create <div class=”address”> when there’s already an element that does that for you.
What SEO professionals should know about the <address> tag
- Microsoft (http://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/default.aspx?id=70027) uses an algorithm (VIPS) that identifies sections of a page based on a “visual” approach, which means search engines can understand “where” the footer section or navigation part of a page are. Placing the address tag on the footer of the website will clearly communicate to search engines the physical location of the business/website.
- The address tag is an important part of the local SEO game.
- Don’t forget to claim your address in local listings like Google Places or Yellow Pages. Include Superpages, infoUSA, Citysearch, Localeze, Yelp, Yahoo!, Acxiom and InsiderPages in your claiming arsenal.
- Depending on the keywords you target, it’s probably a good idea to also insert your city in the address tag in the title tag to0.
- If you’re working on a website that has also multiple brick-and-mortar store locations, persuade your management to make a web page for each store location.
What programmers should know about the implementation of the <address> tag
- Make sure that each address you display on the website is enclosed in this tag.
- A better option for displaying contact details is to use the hCard microformat.
What copywriters should know about the address tag
- Try to identify the address format used by Google on Google Places, and use the same format on your pages.
- International address formats will vary from country to country.
Are you a web designer, copywriter, programmer or search engine optimizer with a suggestion about how this tag should be used for SEO purposes? Please leave a comment or contact the author with your suggestions.
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Drew Hammond said:
Mar 26, 11 at 11:06 amThanks for the info. I feel like I’m a bit late implementing this on my websites but I suppose better no than never.
Have you done any research on whether or not this will affect your google rankings, either in different regions of the same country or different google TLDs?
I’ve also been wondering about the GWT option to target audience by a particular country. Any comment on that? I fear that by selecting a single country, my rankings in other countries will drop.
Drew Hammond
TraiaN said:
Mar 26, 11 at 2:11 pmDrew, I didn’t conduct any proper research on this, but I can share from the experience with our clients. Changing the targeted country to specific country will affect traffic from other countries. In general we leave it to Google to decide this, but there are cases when we changed country targeting for some reasons, i.e. if you’re doing business in Canada only – don’t ship to US or internationally – then we’ll change targeting to Canada. Also, the address tag or the microformat will help more with your local SEO, rather than country wide.
Dominic108 said:
Oct 30, 11 at 8:20 pmOK, I might be spamming here, but it is for an experiment on the importance of phone numbers and street addresses in determining whether pages linked by a canonical tag will be consolidated or not. We have pages that are identical except that they have different phone numbers and street addresses in their header and footers. Each of these page has an associated page that is dedicated to its own subject, but has the same phone number and street address. I want to test that the dedicated pages will be indexed separately while the pages linked by a canonical tag will be consolidated. Some say that because phone numbers and street addresses are important for search engines, the consolidation will not happen. Only an experiment will convince me otherwise. I need links to the dedicated pages such as this one and links to the linked pages such as this one as well. Just delete this post if you think the question is irrelevant. I think it is relevant because a tag could make it easier to determine whether or not the contact information is uniquely linked to the page.
Dominic108 said:
Oct 30, 11 at 8:25 pmOops, the second link is incorrect. It should be http://civm.ca/?store=somerled.
TraiaN said:
Oct 31, 11 at 10:55 pmlet me know how it goes.
Dominic108 said:
Nov 01, 11 at 6:27 amI will gladly inform you when new results are obtained. I hope that we will get a full consolidation of the linked pages together with a separate indexing of the dedicate pages. However, my intention is to continue the experiment even after that, just in case Google changes its criteria later. The dedicated page that is linked above will contain the updated results, if any.
Dominic108 said:
Dec 13, 11 at 2:35 pmHello,
As I hoped, the results of the experiment is that the canonical link elements were followed. The details of the results (screenshots) can be seen here http://codeforweb.org/dedicated.php?store=somerled.
Some people asked whether the link juice is actually passed. It is an interesting question because Google manages a canonical link element as a 301 redirect and when it sees a 301 redirect sometimes Google does not register the redirection, but still removes the “redirected” page from the index, which is pretty bad. However, I checked that the links are actually registered in Google Webmaster tool “Links to your site”.
I cannot believe that the links that are registered in this tool would be fake, i.e., that they would not correspond to anything used in the algorithm. At this point, common sense dictates that it is fine to use the canonical link elements in variants of a page with different phone numbers and street addresses. To be safe, because we never know for sure, I would certainly recommend that one carefully monitors the link juice, but I would not let the fear of a strange and never announced variation on Google algorithm determines the structure of a website.
TraiaN said:
Dec 13, 11 at 3:10 pmDominic, thanks for sharing the test results. As you mentioned, the link in the canonical attributes are followed, and that’s the expected behaviour. Google needs to know that you are not actually trying to point a cartoon page to a canonical page that could be adult. As for PR passing, I guess Google may decide to pass PR based on the relationship between the interlinked pages.
Dominic108 said:
Dec 13, 11 at 5:16 pmYes, your cartoon Vs adult content example was used by Matt Cutt in a 2009 video on this subject. He presents it to explain that Google algo is very lenient. He explains that unless we do something of this kind, the canonical link element will be honored.
As for PR passing, I am certain that a small percentage of the page rank is lost because this is the case with a 301 redirect. However, if the percentage was to depend on the similarity between the pages, Google would definitively say it. It would be a kind of penalty on the link and a penalty can only be more efficient if it existence is well known.