It has been about a month since I released my Google Maps API Tutorial and I thought this would be a good time to look back on it. The map tutorial definitely increased my blog stats and helped my Google rank– see included pics. I originally created the tutorial to help out a couple of guys on the Godbit forum and hoped that it would help some more people along the way. You know, just trying to Give Back.

The post went way beyond my expectations. The tutorial has received a little more than 500 hits and 350 unique page views at the time of this writing. Not bad for a post on a blog that has barely been around for a month. I know that 500 hits isn’t much for a lot of bloggers and websites out there, but for a simple guy like myself, it’s pretty good.

I think what made this tutorial unique was the fact that it shows how to add directions on the popup marker and explains getting your geocoordinates. I know I searched all over the net to figure out how to get that simple directions feature. Google still hasn’t released a routing service in the API, so you still have to pass the parameters to an actual Google Maps page.

I feel kind of bad because I didn’t write a lot of the code used in the tutorial. I basically found some code a guy was giving away (after a lot of searching), modded it, added some more comments in the source code, and explained how to set everything up and do some customization. I did include his name and a link to his site in the credits and in the source code. You should check out his site, it has a lot of other great Google Map API examples.

I would also like to take this time to thank the academy all the people that has made the tutorial successful. Again, feel free to ask me any questions. I’ll do my best to help. If you’ve used the code on any of your sites leave a link in the comments, I would love to see it.

Oh yeah, here are the screen captures:

This show my post as #2 on Google for the search criteria “google map directions tutorial.”

This one shows me as #1 for “get glatlng for input address.”

Number of Unique views in the past month.

Number of Page views in the past

My PageRank for my pages in Google according to Google Sitemaps.
Almost reached a medium rank after only having my new site for a month!