Christian Heilmann of Smashing magazine recently wrote a very detailed article on the constant expansion of Geo Location and its effects on localization for website and application developers. His piece is original, full of insights and just as technical as you’d expect from an individual actively engaged in the scene. It’s worth a read and it also highlights a couple of issues which geo location provides us with at the moment which perfectly picture the challenges posed by new technology.

In my recent post on your website working locally I covered just how you can leverage Google and its massive indexing power in order to attract customers within your immediate locality. Christian’s post highlights the fact that technology, however simple it is to apply, is incredibly complex at this level which means it is not fail-safe. The fact, for instance, that Heathrow airport on geo-located servers appears to believe that those connecting are Finnish and serving up that language would be funny were it not an instance which causes incredible frustration when it happens to you.

The point is that when you apply technology its aim should be, always, to help your end-user or customer and for that to happen you need to have manual selections and choices which give maximum choice on their part. Full automation, like that at Heathrow airport, which scouts out where it thinks you might be, for instance, and choose automatically what language to show you is nothing less than frustrating. Christian’s experience is backed by my own when I was travelling through Russia where websites which automatically scouted my IP and tried to serve up Russian to me were the cause of much frustration on my part and tended to lose, mostly, my custom.

Search engine optimization like that detailed in my book: SEO Help: 20 steps to get your website on Google’s #1 page is designed to allow you to control, yourself, what happens on your website, how it is perceived and how it appears on search engines. It also allows you to make the choices which help your visitors and potential customers find you when they most need you. It is only by understanding how to use these elements correctly that you can begin to take advantage of the localization potential offered by search engines like Google.  At that point your website begins to become responsive to its visitors’ needs rather than just be geared towards the services you are selling and it is only then when it begins to become truly successful.