Foursquare helps you search for stuff your friends like

In January 2012, Foursquare announced the Explore feature, which leveraged its 1.5 billion checkins into personalised recommendations for users. By collating millions of tips,  Foursquare now allows you to search for places you’ve and for your friends have visited, but also placed you haven’t been or that have a foursquare special deal.

Here’s what Foursquare had to say about Explore:

"The vision for foursquare is much much bigger – it’s about adding an ‘interesting’ layer to the whole world, tailored just for you...Whether you’re planning a night out in your neighborhood or a vacation in Europe, what should you do? Which of your friends should you ask about things? How can you save money? Where can you easily find great places you’ve never been to? How do you search for personalized recommendations in the real world."

When you visit Explore and login to your account, you see a Google map and various search options.

The results then display all of the data you and your friends have given over the years you have been checking-in to locations. If you’re looking for a beer in your area, you’ll be shown a map of all of the local bars and pubs, along with user generated content about them including tips, photos and visitor comments.

It looks like Foursquare has finally worked out a highly valuable way of using all the data it has been collecting from us for years. It’s also in a great position to monetise the killer app by replicating Google’s search and selling busineses a pay-per-click paid listing that would show at the top of the search results.

How to optimise your website

Pi's top 10 tips on "How to Optimise your website for search engines"

1. The Keywords tag - The first step is to choose the most suitable search terms for your site. Use keyword metatags to describe the words a visitor would use to find your site in a search engine like Google or Nine MSN.

2. The Description Tag a brief sentence description of the page. Some search engines also use the description to display a summary of the page.

3. Page Title Change tag to incorporate "Keywords" i.e. Search Engine Optimisation by Pi .

4. Insert Alt Tags on images to assist increasing the number of word matches to the search.

5. H tags are given more weight than ordinary text and, the bigger the H size, the more weight it receives. So include the target search term in H tags at least once on the page, and two or three times if possible. Also, place the first H tag as near to the top of the page as possible.

6. Bold text is given more weight than ordinary text but not as much as H tags. As much as is reasonable, enclose the search term in bold tags when it appears on the page.

7. Body Text: Include more keywords on the home page copy that describes to the visitor what your business does, think what words would a customer use to find you. Use the search term as often as you can on the page whilst not detracting from the page's readability. Make sure that you use the term once or twice very early in the page's body text and as often as possible throughout. Reword small parts, and even add sentences, to make sure that the search term is well represented in the text.

8. List your site in Google and DMOZ

9. Backlinks - Create Links to associated websites- inward and outbound from your site - The idea behind link popularity is that the more pages that link to a page, the more important the page is and it, therefore, deserves a higher ranking than it would otherwise have. It is not enough just to have a large number of backlinks, it is the quality of backlinks along with the quantity that help you rank better in Search Engines.

10. Make the site accessible for good search engine placement, as accessible sites are machine friendly, making it far easier for search engines to index the content. See our top 10 tips for accessibility.