Foursquare is experiencing record interest in the wake of the launch of Facebook Spots; on Thursday, the place service broke its record for new user signups.

Facebook Spots brings checkins and place broadcasting to Facebook’s (Facebook) massive 500 million user base. It’s the bread-and-butter of Foursquare (Foursquare), which has led to plenty of speculation over the future of Foursquare as well as the company’s next moves. Can it survive in the face of competition from a behemoth like Facebook?

At least for now, the answer seems to be yes. According to a tweet from Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley, the organization had its “biggest day ever” for signups of new users on Thursday. The surge in signups was probably due to the countless comparisons folks are producing between Facebook Areas and Foursquare. With heightened media and user interest, it’s no wonder persons are signing up to uncover out what this place thing is all about.

Record signups doesn’t mean the company’s inside clear, though. As the weeks and months pass and Areas establishes itself as a service, we’ll get a greater picture of whether Foursquare can fend off Facebook’s advances and continue its rapid growth.

In an interview with Mashable (Mashable), Crowley mentioned that he believes Facebook and Foursquare serve two various purposes. “Facebook is about sharing experiences that you’ve had,” he stated. “Foursquare is additional about the present tense along with the future tense.”

Foursquare is approaching 3 million users, but that’s still a drop in the bucket compared to Facebook’s 500 million users. For Foursquare’s sake, let’s hope Crowley is right that the two services fulfill unique purposes.

There are a number of things that I initially look for about a new client. Is the domain relevant, are there keywords in the domain, or in the title tag, how old is the domain, etc.? These are simple yet important items to have on your site and properly setup to be well optimized. But they are easy enough for you to do:

1) Domain SEO

Is this a new site? Old or existing website? Look, branding is everything online. A great domain does not have to be your specific keywords. It used to help a lot. but now it only matters if it is an exact match to a “T”. But even then it is give less credit from search engines such as Google. It will help. But it is no longer everything. Think of either your business name or adding a keyword to your business name (coke, cocacola.com, cokesodas.com) otherwise try to find the best match using keywords alone but also try to keep it short and simple.

Don’t ever buy .net or .org unless you can also get the .com. Why? Well, that’s where people will default. If you tell someone coke.gf they will end up going to coke.com or most likely just type it in coke and see what happens. This relies even more on your SEO and brand management campaigns. So, keep it simple.

Also, check the others that ARE taken. Don’t name your company redlightmedia.com if their is another company out their called redlight.com and they do media. You will have a tough time beating them. In business it’s best to be first to market. In domains it is best to the first, shortest, and more accurate yet to the point. SEs see how old domains are too and think of the other guy as the better established out there.

2) Hosting SEO

Why is good hosting better than cheap hosting while just starting out? Well, if you are trying to save money and grow your business via search engine optimization you better have reliable hosting. What if Google comes to see your site and it is down. “Well”, you say, “I have 99% guarantee.” Do the math. 1% of a year is over 3.5 days. What if you were down when Google, Yahoo, or Bing came to your website to check on things and you were not there. That’s like a media firm coming down to do a story on your business and not only are the doors closed but the building is not even there. Then they run a story like, “business is not even present”. Google will pull your listing from their search results just to protect how “they” look. Their credibility rides on accurately posted data. They won’t dare direct you to a site that does not exist.

3) Title Tag SEO

Look, this is very simple. It is by far the most critical thing on your site for keywords. If your title tag is your business name, that is fine. As long as people are search for that name. But if you are new and no one knows you yet you need to add keywords. Not too many however. Most search engines prefer around 80 characters (not words). Use them wisely and precisely. Don’t make it look spammy and try to keep it clean for your human readers too.

Example: Coke

This is fine for them.

Example: Coke Softdrinks

Not bad, they might get someone searching for softdrinks too.

Example: Soft drinks, energy drinks, sports drinks, and bottled water | Coke

Here they will gain traffic from more searches and yet still come up for their brand name as well.

NOTE: Do not use the same title tag on every page. Each page has unique content, so use a unique title. It might contain some of the same keywords, and that is fine. But name each page’s title what they can expect on that page.

4) Other META tag SEO

Their are many meta tags used to do various things on your website. In terms of SEO you may hear of two others. Description and Keywords. The keywords meta tag is no longer used, period. You might come across a VERY small search engine that uses it so you could enter words if you wish. But no of the large search engines use it. In fact the only thing about it they look for is to see if you are trying to keyword spam (use a bunch crammed in there) to try to cheat or out-whit the search engines.

Next is the Description meta tag. Here is your chance to tell the search engines what to post in the text that is read when your site is listed in the search results.

Example: Coca-cola United States

It is recommended that you are informative as to why they should click to view your site and use some of your keywords about that page. If it is your home page then you’ll have to be a bit more general.

Example: Black T-shirt that says, “You rock, I roll”.

This is perfect for a product page.

Example: Funny graphic T-shirts, posters and more

Here is a good general home page that would use some of the keywords you might think those looking for fun shirts during their search engine searches.

Again, don’t make it too long. Here you can use 250 characters. Try to keep it simple, readable, to the point but also include some of your keywords for the page’s content.

NOTE: Using keywords you think are good for your site but that aren’t necessarily on that page may hurt by diluting the success of a good meta description.

5) Head Tags SEO

This tag is different in that it is actually going to show up on the page. Similar to an outline of a story or paragraph, this tag will define a new page’s title. You can have multiple on one page. But only have one that uses the largest of them (H1). For the other sub headers you could use H2, H3, H4, etc.

This tag can be changed graphically in your style sheet (CSS) to match the rest of your site’s color, font, etc. The code for the tag is simply: <h1></h1>. Within the brackets you put the text:

<h1>Coke</h1> will produce:

Coke

Where the <h2>Coke Bottling Facilities</h2> will produce:

Coke Bottling Facilities

Just a tiny bit smaller. But search engines see these as a high indicator as to what someone might find on your website.

More free SEO tips and tools

If you have any questions about these tips or techniques, please contact our SEO services department and let’s see if we can help. We are working on a check list you can use to see where you are in your search engine efforts. But in the meantime here are our free seo tools you can use to check your current placement and understand your site and competitors better.

Yahoo! and Microsoft have now received the regulatory clearance to form a new search partnership. This is a huge deal and milestone of a first step in both of their strategies to help reach an even larger audience with greater ease and efficiency.

They don’t yet have any immediate changes posted to their search or marketing features and offerings. Both companies are working to make this change seamlessly and to best benefit their customers. It appears that their time frame is end of year or prior to the 2010 holiday season.

This Yahoo and Microsoft merger will help you reach more customers by a total of reaching 150,000,000 searchers and get about 60% more searches than on Yahoo alone. There are other unannounced plans to enhance their way of offering searches and search marketing. Search advertising customers will save time and money but using one place to manage you accounts through the numerous networks these two giants own, operate and are partner with online for search engines. Furthermore, both are going to be rolling out new features and innovations over the months following the Yahoo and Microsoft search engine merger.

Social Media Optimization uses methods for gaining publicity through social media websites, online communities and websites. Social Media Optimization (SMO) includes methods such as blogging, social news sites and RSS feeds. Also this can include the use of image optimization and video optimization.

SMO works better to drive traffic to website and does less for the actual SEO of a site as a whole. So, this works best WITH traditional SEO work. It’s great to have the site at the top of search engines but until then and to gain even more traffic you should try Social Media Optimization.

Here are a few ways to conducting social media optimization:

• Get online communities connected with your website or theme
• Encourage the “mashup” of information
• Help your content and message travel other sites
• Reward inbound links to your website
• Make tagging and bookmarking easy for your visitors
• Increase your linkability by offering the code

Welcome to the our new home! We are now Affordable SEO Packages. To help celebrate we are offering lower rates and increased features for our package offerings. But these lower prices are just for the next month.