Today I decided to try something new and to add some geocoding data to a new site’s “Contact Us” page address hCard. For those of you that haven’t yet really experimented with using geocoding within a microformat it is actually done quite easily. All you do is add the following code to your hCard:

<div class="geo">
	<span class="latitude">[lat number]</span>
	<span class="longitude">[long number]</span>
</div>

So, how do you get lat/long codes? Simple – you use Google Maps… Just go to http://maps.google.com and look up the location that you want to geocode. It’s good to give the found location a double-click in the map just to make sure that it is the center focused it. Then click on the “Link to this Page” button. Look up in the URL and you’ll see a ton of various query strings. Look for the ll= NOT the sll= or anything like that… it will say &ll= with a number, like so:

&ll=38.898114,-77.037163

Just after the last number will be another “&” to start the next query option, make sure you leave that last “&” out. That’s it – the first number in that string is your latitude and the second number (after the comma) in the longitude.

Happy Geocoding!