Bill S. at SEO by the Sea has a look at a recent Microsoft patent application which covers the fairly familiar territory of how to identify location-based information on a web page.

MSFT describes a system where they’ll classify the location-based info. into three categories: provider location, content location, and serving location. Bill explains what those three categories are, and offers this pointer for business / web site owners:

A human visitor might be able to understand how those different types of content apply to your site more easily than a search engine could. For a search engine, you may have to spell the differences between provider location, content location, and serving area more bluntly.

And not to blatantly piggy-back on Bill’s words, but that “spelling the differences” is exactly the point of my recent 8 Simple Steps to Make a Page More Local tutorial.