Effective Geotargeting with PHP

By Akash Mehta
2008-01-27


Tips and tricks

Typically automatic language selection was very tricky, as browsers often weren't setup properly to tell the server what languages the end user expected. The remedy was to ask the user directly, but a long list of languages was very daunting for the end-user, and leaving some minority languages out was potentially insulting. With geolocation, you could combine the user's country with a database of locales based on country, then default to one but offer a clear choice of two or three (as appropriate) for the user to choose from; problem solved.

Content delivery networks also use geotargeting a lot. The idea of a content delivery network is that servers located physically closer to the user often incurred lower data transfer costs and were somewhat quicker, an important factor in winning users. With geotargeting, for example, all images from a site can be fed off a local server. Alternatively, you could redirect the user to the local version of your website altogether, possibly even on an entirely new domain. Say your domain was example.com, you might want to redirect me to example.com.au, where your local site is not only quicker to load, but has better targeted content and more relevant ads as well.

Tutorial Pages:
» Introduction
» IP Targeting: It’s tricky business!
» Getting started
» Let's write some code!
» Tips and tricks
» Going further

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