Physical address and contact details in Meta tags

Question

I remember someone once saying it was useful (for SEO purposes) to include your address and contact details in the site's Meta tags.

I don't recall if he meant in in the meta description or in another type of meta tag.

Have you hear of this strategy before?

I believe the person implied that Google would tie all of your Local Listings together for a better SEO score if you listed matching contact details in your meta tags.

Answer 1

Note that we do not use locational meta tags (like "geo.position" or "distribution") or HTML attributes for geotargeting. While these may be useful in other regards, we've found that they are generally not reliable enough to use for geotargeting. (from: Working with multi-regional websites)

Other SE might have a different view, Bing as an example.

It makes no real difference if you apply "country" as a location or a more specific physical address, see:

However, Google:

Other signals can give us hints. This could be from local addresses & phone numbers on the pages, use of local language and currency, links from other local sites, and/or the use of Google's Local Business Center (where available).

So signals (a combination of your localization efforts) are the way to go. Use rich snippets or take a look at the microformat location efforts to be at the front of parsable address and location information, along with external links from localized sources.

Answer 2

This is probably referring to meta "location" tags such as these.

<meta name="zipcode" content="08054, 08226">

Many claim that these don't really help SEO, and that most top ranking local results don't include these tags. Personally I have never heard anything about Google or other search engines using these tags and I cannot find any information about them acknowledging these tags, either.

I would probably recommend not wasting the bytes, but it may be worth testing to see if it appears to impact your rankings.