Facebook a Threat To Foursquare?

Five years ago, one of the last things an entrepreneur with a hot consumer internet startup wanted to hear was "Google is launching a new service just like yours." It's 2010, and that has changed to

"Facebook is launching a new service just like yours."

But that's precisely what Dennis Crowley, the founder of the increasingly popular location-based service Foursquare, recently heard.

With Facebook Places, Facebook wants in the growing market for 'check-ins'. 'Checking in', of course, is an increasingly popular way for consumers to share information about themselves on the social web

today. And it also happens to have some monetization potential to boot.

Given Foursquare's prominence in this space, it's not surprising that some have questioned if Facebook Places will be the death of Foursquare.

There are two possibilities:

- Facebook will, for the average mainstream user, make it all but pointless to use standalone services like Foursquare, leaving these services to compete for niches within the broader market.

- Facebook will accelerate the mainstreaming of 'check-ins' and grow the market for the Foursquares of the world.

Which is most likely? That's anyone's guess. But if history is any indication, Foursquare, like Twitter, which also had to deal with competition from Facebook, will still be here next week. But the real question for Foursquare is what sort of changes it will have to make to compete effectively against Facebook's encroachment. When Twitter caught Facebook's attention, Twitter was far more popular than

Foursquare is today. That means Foursquare may find it more difficult than Twitter to deal with Facebook.

For his part, Foursquare's Crowley doesn't seem too worried. He says that Facebook had to make Places "a little bit generic" given the massive audience Facebook has to please, and that Foursquare, which is popular but still much, much smaller, can afford to be fun:

Part of what you see on Foursquare, which is the game mechanics and the snarkiness and really more importantly like the fun and the playfulness that we build into the product, because I think that's the stuff that most people relate to. And you can poo-poo how like those touchy-feely things don't mean too much to users but I really think that's the core and kind of the soul of the service and people identify with that.

There's some truth to this, but Crowley can't have it both ways. If Facebook has to be "generic" to appeal to a large number of people, Crowley would necessarily have to believe that Foursquare will need to ditch some of the game mechanics and "snarkiness" if it too wants to appeal to a broad audience. Certainly Foursquare's investors haven't poured lots of money into the company at a rich valuation believing that it would remain a service relegated to first adopters.

Which brings us back to Twitter. One of the reasons Twitter is still thriving despite Facebook's presence in its market is that Twitter's brand has always been flexible. Even today, Twitter is very much what you make of it. Foursquare, on the other hand, can't ditch game mechanics and snark without ditching the core of its brand. Whether that brand will continue to rise will depend a lot on what combination of utility and entertainment consumers are looking for when they check in.

Source: E-consultancy

SEO Sage: Optimization Can Be Cheap but Never Easy

Search engine optimization is the least expensive method of getting visitors to a website, Ralph Wilson, founder and editor-in-chief of Web Marketing Today, told the audience at the SES Conference and Expo in San Francisco Tuesday.

In a presentation on SEO basics, Wilson outlined tips on how to get the most out of SEO.

He also mentioned several mistakes commonly made in website design, even by professionals.

First, website owners must conduct keyword research, Wilson said. They must not only look for the main keywords people would search on to find their product or service, but also synonyms, plurals and misspellings.

It's best to use keywords the person in the street would use, rather than the technically correct terms.

"I was doing some consulting for a software firm and it used the industry term on its website, it didn't use the term people commonly used," Wilson remarked. "They wondered why people weren't finding them."

Next, website owners must analyze keywords and phrases, identifying the main competitive keywords, then finding less competitive two- to four-word keyphrases.

"People who are ready to buy use more keywords in their search," Wilson explained.

For SEO, website owners can start with four to five keywords.

Also, go for a niche description rather than a general one, Wilson advised.

"Competition for keywords gets very expensive," Wilson pointed out. "It's very expensive to optimize for common keywords like 'insurance,' so don't go head to head with the big companies; choose your niche."

Free tools for keyword analysis include Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) AdWords Keyword Tool and Google Insights for Search.

Use keywords in the first and last paragraphs on a Web page, and hyperlink the important keywords, Wilson said.

Websites identify themselves to search engines by their titles, Wilson told his audience. The title of a website is entered into the title tag in HTML.

However, businesses should not use their company names as their titles.

"People don't want to search for your company name, they want to find what they're looking for," Wilson pointed out. "Make the title descriptive, provocative, use the important keywords that are on the page in your title. This one thing will change your keyword rankings."

Website owners should also make sure their site designers know how to use the heading tags.

"The H1, H2, H3, H4 heading tags are the clues in headings and subheads, and search engines often look for these," Wilson explained. "Your website designer may well have used the class such as 'big type' rather than the H1 heading tag. Make sure the designer uses the heading tag and then defines that in the style sheet."

One of the mistakes even professionals make is to have a splash page on a website, Wilson said. The splash page is the initial page before the home page, and is often written in Adobe (Nasdaq: ADBE) Flash, with dancing logos and branding copy, he added.

"Having a Flash page is not too smart," Wilson remarked. "Get to the meat."

Flash and JavaScript, which is also commonly used on Web pages, make things difficult for Google searches, Wilson said.

"Google can't read JavaScript or Flash for search purposes, so it won't be able to find other pages on your website," Wilson explained. "Make sure that all your sectional pages have an HTML link from your

home page and all the pages in a section have hard HTML links to the first pages in those sections."

Long URLs, which many content management systems use, are another no-no for websites, Wilson suggested. They make a website too complicated, and sometimes Google will not index a whole site, he warned. Most modern content management systems use search engine-friendly tags, Wilson said.

The ranking of a website or Web page on Google depends strongly on the number of links pointing back to it, Wilson said.

Some of the ways to get links pointing to your website are to provide great content, get listed in directories and request reciprocal links.

"Yahoo Directory is the best directory, and it costs (US)$299 a year to get listed there," Wilson said. "Currently, Yahoo (Nasdaq: YHOO) is in alliance with Bing, and what will happen to the Yahoo Directory a year from now remains to be seen."

Another option is for website owners to submit their links to the Open Directory Project. Links are vetted by human editors, so it takes a long time to get listed, Wilson said.

"If you don't get listed immediately, don't submit a link or you'll go to the end of the line," Wilson warned.

Website owners should avoid link farms, which "have links to everybody in the world," Wilson pointed out.

"Don't even go there because Google will think you're trying to trick it, and it's been known to penalize companies that have tricky linking schemes used to defraud it," Wilson said.

Another no-no is to purchase text links to your site.

"If Google finds you've done this, it could penalize you and hurt you big time," Wilson warned.

Google Enhances CPC

Google AdWords has launched Enhanced CPC, an automated bidding feature that allows marketers to maximize conversions by adjusting their CPC automatically based on their track records of conversion.

In short, AdWords' Enhanced CPC will adjust your costs to the likelihood of conversion, thereby boosting ROI - and, yes, conversions too. AdWords said the new tool also "detects attributes such as the user's location, language settings, browser, and operating system and analyze how these attributes may impact the likelihood of your ad converting."

"Advertisers set their bids, and our system simply 'enhances' them by either raising or lowering their bid for each auction depending on the likelihood of a conversion," Lisa Coffey, product marketing manager told us.

New API Revealed for Google Analytics

Google began previewing on Wednesday a spruced-up API to access Google Analytics configuration data.

Google Analytics gives users insights into website traffic and marketing effectiveness. Described as a significant new piece of the Google Analytics developer platform, the Google Analytics Management API offers read-only access to Google Analytics configuration data and consists of five new Google Data Feeds that map directly into the Google Analytics data model, said Jeetendra M. Soneja, of the Google Analytics API team, in a blog post on Wednesday.

Read-only access is offered to account, profile, web property and goal data as well as to advanced segments.

While the previous API returned all configuration data at once, which could be inefficient, the separate feeds enable developers to request only needed data, said Soneja.

"Many developers have asked for a faster, more powerful way to access Google Analytics account configuration data through the Data Export API. We've listened and today we're releasing a preview of the new Google Analytics Management API," Soneja said.

"The API will change, grow, and get better over time. We recommend developers who aren't committed to making updates to their applications only experiment with the new API and continue to use the Account Feed as their primary source for configuration data. We will strive to give you at least one month advanced notice of changes to this API," Soneja said.