Sam Rutley » SMO

3 Reasons Why YOU Should Be On Foursquare

Sam Rutley — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 10:15:58 +0000

If you don’t know what Foursquare is please read my previous post on how to view your Foursquare history in Google Earth.

Citations – Google uses citations for Local Business Listings in the same way it uses Inbound Links for its local ranking algorithms. The more citations you have the higher probability you have to rank well in Google Local Business. Foursquare allows you to add your address and phone number to your listing which is enough to qualify as a citation for this purpose. Tom Critchlow has some awesome information about Google Local here.
Link Building – You can leave tips on venue pages. Not many people have noticed that when you leave a tip you have the option to specify a link. These links are followed. For an example of these links take a look at my comment on the PushON Foursquare listing.
Bing Maps – Bing recently announced that they’re going to be including Foursquare data in their maps. There is no reason why Google and other mapping website won’t start doing it.

Got another reason? Let me know!

View Your Foursquare History in Google Earth

Sam Rutley — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 18:11:31 +0000

I’ve been using Foursquare for a few months now and unlike most people find it really addictive rather than pointless. For those who don’t know Foursquare is a location based social network which allows you to “check in” to venues throughout the world. The locations automatically get posted to your Foursquare page and you can add and view tips for each venue. If you check into a venue more times than anyone else you become mayor, and there are “badges” awarded for completing a number of different objectives.

The main reason I find Foursquare so interesting is that you can view all of your check in history on Google Earth. This feature is not promoted as well as it should be by Foursquare, so this is how you do it.

Log into your Foursquare account
Select the “History” tab from the horizontal navigation menu
Select the RSS icon on the right-hand side of the page
Select the KML feed link from the list of feed formats

The KML file should download and allow you to view your history in Google Earth.

You can download Google Earth from here.

Sam Rutley on Foursquare

Optimised Twitter Pages?

Sam Rutley — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 13:47:15 +0000

TechCrunch has reported that Twitter has updated its page titles into a more search engine friendly format. Previously Twitter user page titles looked like:

However now they include the users real name as well as their username.

This is another opportunity great for both brands and people to own more of the SERPs for their names.