A client that has a lot of physical locations asked me how to improve search engine optimization (SEO) for those locations. They have web pages for each of their locations and were concerned about making sure all those individual location pages are getting ranked well. This doesn't seem to be a very well documented subject, but I found a number of ways to make sure that Google and other search engines know more about the physical locations that are related to a web site.
Google, in particular, has been making locative information more important than ever. If Google has any information about where I am located (and it usually does), it will push results in my location to the top of the search results list for any term I search for. For instance, if I search for 'Coffee' into a normal Google search, I get results like this, even though I didn't add anything about my location in my search terms. This makes it clear that having accurate location information in my web site must be very important.
