Plenty of interactive online mapping sites are available these days - including Google Map, Yahoo Map, Bing Map, MapPoint, and many more.

They are mainly used as directions tools for road mapping and route planner. Type in a street address or zip code and you will be able to find its exact location, including nearby buildings, parks, bars, restaurants, coffee shops, hotels and information about how to get there.

But there are many other possible applications that website owners can make use of interactive maps for their particular industries and markets. There are many interactive mapping software which can help you to take advantage of geographic-related data, and to effectively visualize territory and business information by creating your own custom interactive maps.

Interactive map making software usually supports custom definable regions, areas and location points. Users can select pre-designed flash map templates, and easily change color settings of countries or counties, and pinpoint locations on the map by using pushpin buttons or icons. A hover over tooltip box can be displayed with your own text, images, with links to another web page, PDF documents, or sites on the World Wide Web.

As the main purpose of these maps are for navigation or data representation purpose, geographical details such as highways, buildings, rivers are not always necessary, which makes the map cleaner and easier to navigate by visitors. With few click-through on the national, state or county map, visitors can quickly find information or be redirected to specific page about a particular location on the map image.

Some possible applications using interactive maps on websites including:

Retail Shops / Branches Locator: A web-based interactive flash map can help your customers to find the nearest retail shop or branch location in few mouse clicks. For example, you can use an interactive map of United States on your website, with pushpin buttons to pinpoint all your retail shops, hotels or any other type of facilities. Your visitors can make selection simply by clicking on a pushpin button, and then he can see the list of options available including address and contact details.

Interactive Real Estate Map: A real estate website can use interactive maps to display available properties on national, state or county maps. Push pins of different colors and shapes can be used to pinpoint residential properties, commercial properties, resorts, apartments, corporate offices, and more. Hover over effects can be included which can provide additional pop-up information about a particular property.

Marketing and Sales Heat Map: You can create interactive maps using your own business data, and use the heat map function of interactive mapping software to generate a graphical representation of regional sales data base on sales volume, so to visualize easily how your sales are distributed among different geography regions, and decide how to spend your marketing budget in order to generate the maximum sales revenue.

Energy Industry: Can use an interactive map on website to display the oil and gas fields in a specific region, with enlarged view of the oil and gas fields showning upon mouseover, and display further information for each oil or gas field in an information box.

Interactive maps have become a popular instrument in visualize geospatial business data, and as a navigation tool to help visitors find locations related information quickly. Take advantage of this instrument today, and use interactive map software to help you to create the maps you are looking for quickly.