Wouldn’t it be cool if business websites were all tagged with meta data like:

• business hours
• geolocation (latitude & longitude)
• NAICS code (the successor to SIC code)
• physical & mailing addresses

Just imagine what a search engine could do with such data. Searchers could restrict their results to just those businesses that are open late, for example.

What else would you add to the above list?

Webmasters the world over have already tagged their websites with meta keywords and meta descriptions, and many are rushing to post Google Sitemaps XML files, so the idea that they will also tag their sites with additional meta data seems pretty plausible to me. Particularly if there’s a ranking benefit to be had.

If this sort of thing becomes widely adopted and integrated into local search on the major engines, it could spell doom to the online Yellow Pages directories, at least those that fail to keep innovating. More and more, Google and Yahoo are becoming our universal “operating system” for the Internet, and I see that trend only continuing.