Search the Google for geocoding in QGIS and you find a few nice articles, mostly pointing to third party web sites that will geocode for you, e.g. this post from 2009. It’s a good post, but there’s an easier way now.
Well, let’s see if a little SEO will help solve this f
or people– a great tool for geocoding in QGIS is MMQGIS. Add it as an extension, choose “GeoCode from Google”, and load up your CSV of addresses. You may have to sit and wait a while, but rest assured, the result will be worth the wait. So, load up the extensions manager and search for MMGIS. Install. Enjoy.
Now, off to find census data during the sequester… .
Smathermather's Weblog 
At one point I was going to write a tutorial on how to use MMQGIS to geocode multiple addresses. Never got around to it…
http://www.stevencanplan.com/2009/geocoding-in-quantum-gis/
Thanks for sharing this. It would be great to have an image or two though. It actually took me a while to figure out that the MMQGIS plugin got it’s own dropdown menu.
Hi, This appears to be working for me so thanks. I am attempting to geocode ~ 2300 addresses and so far it is taking about 3 hours. Is this expected? Does anyone know how long this should typically take? I also geocoded 4 addresses and that took a matter of seconds. Thanks!
It looks like this is working, knock on wood, just wanted to say thanks for getting me going. Anyone else notice that with only a basic Esri License you find yourself using QGIS more and more for anything outside of basic editing…?
Hi – this has worked for me in the past (for which many thanks). It’s now stopped worked and I receive the following error: “Failure deleting existing shapefile: C:/[location/filename of CSV uploaded].shp”. I updated the MMGIS plugin and receive the same error message. Any ideas?
You have to put the note found .csv file in the same location as the output shapefile
Hey Ryan – I’m not sure that’s true, but either way I seem to have got it working again. Apologies, I should have said. Can’t remember how I did it – but tidying up my folder architecture and re-installing QGIS might have come into it!