On Tuesday Google announced that they’d begin the rollout of Region Tags, an amendment to the green address line at the bottom of search results that will help users better find your site.

As Google’s blog details:

Let’s say you’ve heard about a boxing club in Canada called “Capital City Boxing.” You try a search for [capital city boxing] to find out more, but it’s hard to tell which result is the one you’re looking for. Here’s a screen shot:

None of the results provide any location information in the title or snippet, nor do they have a regional TLD (such as .ca for Canada). The only way to find the result you’re looking for is to refine your search ([capital city boxing canada] works) or click through the various links to figure it out. Clicking through the first result reveals that there’s apparently another “Capital City Boxing” club in Alabama.

Inserting region takes makes it so that your specific location is detailed in your listing even if you haven’t included it in your header title or meta description. In the case of Google’s example, the fourth listing will now have a green address line that reads “www.ccityboxing.com/about.html – Canada.” Americans need not apply.

Organizing your region tags is easy:

1. Log in to Google’s Webmaster Tools.
2. Choose Site configuration –> Settings –> Geographic Target.
3. Pick a region or country to associate with your site.

So far Google’s only set it up for Top Level Domains that may run across many countries (.com, .org, .net, etc.), but there isn’t much need to specify your country when your TLD is .nz or .ca.

This seems to be the trend lately. You might remember that Facebook added their own version of location targeting just a few weeks ago, too.