A lot of good search engine and Internet marketing is about links. Getting links to your website is one sure way to generate traffic to your website. Link building as the strategy is more commonly known involves many types of promotional activities all designed to grow the number - and the quality - of inbound links to your website and to specific pages within your site.

When reading this, and other Findability link building articles, bear in mind that the whole purpose of link building is to boost the rankings of specific pages of your website. The activity is designed to raise the overall profile of your website in the search engines.

Because of sites like GeoURL, link building doesn't have to limited to creating links for search engines to find; there are many ways to promote your website - such as using sites like GeoURL - profitably where the links exist as a byproduct of the promotional activity.

Although there doesn't seem to be an awful lot that you can do with GeoURL when you actually visit the site, other than add your site to their ever-growing list, the site still currently ranks in the top 100,000 sites in the world (according to Alexa) and that alone should make it worth spending 5 or 10 minutes taking a look at how you can get a link on there.

What really makes the site useful is the number of the 3.5 million sites who have registered who are displaying a GeoURL logo on their site (usually on the page or pages that they've submitted) to allow their site visitors to find out who their nearest neighbours are.

What's so cool about this is not there are lots of pretty logos floating around out there, but the fact that there is a better than average chance of your website showing up as a result of someone clicking a link on one of your neighbours websites. For retail-based businesses, the benefits obviously extend beyond the link.

Suppose you run a restaurant 100 yards away from a large hotel that offers conferences, banqueting facilities and so on and just so happen to have registered on GeoURL and are proudly displaying one of the logos above on their website. If you've registered your restaurant too, then every time someone clicks the GeoURL link to see what else is in the immediate vicinity, bam, they'll see a link to your restaurant. Could be useful? For 5 to 10 minutes effort, I would venture that it's definitely worth a try.

Any businesses sharing a "high street" address could easily work together to add links collaboratively and share traffic generated between their collective websites. Or, perhaps like a lot of small businesses you work from serviced offices. If a lot of businesses in your building were to get on GeoURL, you could all potentially benefit from traffic generated from each others websites.

Hopefully you get the idea of the benefit of GeoURL by now. If the site continues to grow (3.5 million users is pretty good going), then I'm sure that the benefits will continue to increase. Finally, unlike a lot of social networking websites these days, the chances are that when you add your link, it's going to stay on the front page of GeoURL for at least a little while. I've seen links remain on the front page of GeoURL for anything from a few hours up to about 5 days.

So, if you have five to ten minutes to spare and think it's worth it, get your site added to GeoURL by using the instructions below. If, on the other hand, you don't have 5 or 10 minutes to spare, you can always ask us to do it for you - see the link at the bottom of this page.

What to do

I recommend that you read through these instructions once - just to get an idea of what's involved - and then read them through again, carrying out each instruction as you go along. Don't forget, if you get stuck or it's too much, you can ask us to do it for you - bottom of the page.

What you'll need

1. The FTP details for your website. If you don't have these already, you should be able to get them from your web hosting company, perhaps via your control panel or your web designer should be able to give them to you.

The Steps

OK, there are five steps to getting your website listed on GeoURL. For a brief overview, they are:

1. Decide what page(s) of your website you're going to use
2. Find your location
3. Add your location to your website pages
4. Tell GeoURL to add your page to the website
5. Tell everyone else what you've done

  Let's look at each of these in more detail.

Decide what page(s) of your website you're going to use

Ideally, your website page should have some relevance to the location you're going to enter. So, if it's a page about your business, get your business location in there. If it's your own personal blog, enter a location that relates to you.

Find your location

GeoURL wants your location in the form or latitude and longitude. Wish you'd paid more attention during Geography at school? Don't worry, it's relatively easy to get these. GeoURL lists a number of resources to help you find yours. I've reproduced some of the more useful ones here for you. All of these links open in a new window so you'll still have this page open underneath.  

1. www.travelgis.com - TravelGIS is a free geocoding address matching service covering 24 countries. Simply enter your address and the site will return the latitude and longitude that you need.
2. www.streetmap.co.uk - UK only. Enter your reference in whatever way works best for you - postcode is pretty straightforward - and click Search. When your map loads, scroll to the bottom of the screen and click the link that says 'Click here to convert/measure coordinates'. You'll be taken to a screen that shows you all the useful co-ordinates for your address, including your latitude and longitude.
3. http://terraserver.homeadvisor.msn.com - US only. Do an advanced search then enter the address and select the topographical option. You can zoom in to make sure its the right location. Then click the Info link and it shows the coordinates on the map and you can get the coordinates from the URL as well.

Add your location to your website pages

To add the location to your website page, simply add the code to your page. The code goes between what is called the head tags of your page. Once you've copied the code into your webpage, using FTP, upload the page to your website.

Tell GeoURL to add your page to the website

To tell GeoURL to add your page to their website, visit their ping page and follow the instructions there.

Tell everyone else what you've done

Sites like GeoURL become more useful the more people use it. Tell others about GeoURL either by sending them to the GeoURL website or by emailing them a link to this article.