I’ve watched my Twitter friends drop the occasional mention of Foursquare for months, but I never checked it out until I saw Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan tweeting his own Foursquare explorations amongst all of his SEO and search engine posts:

It’s one thing if it’s an obscure hipster application – and quite another when the heavy hitters of SEO pick it up.  It’s time to give Foursquare a closer look.

What is Foursquare?

Do you remember Pogs? Well, take Pogs and combine it with social media and local search and you’ve got Foursquare. Players check-in at venues around town and collect badges. If you’ve been to a particular Starbucks more than anyone else, you are declared “Mayor” of that Starbucks. (You may also need a coffee intervention, but that’s a different topic entirely.) There are tons of badges to collect. I currently have a Newbie badge, and that’s it – though tomorrow when I arrive to work I shall be crowned Mayor of Page 1 Solutions. My mother will be so proud… (You can see a pretty good list of them here.)

This all seems rather silly, right?

Yes, but that’s just the hook, the thing that makes it rather brilliant for us SEOs. Stay with me here, okay?

On Friday, some of my co-workers and I visited D’Vine Wine in downtown Denver, and I took the opportunity to make my first Foursquare check-in. I had to add the venue, but it was simple and intuitive. I spent the weekend checking in to my grocery store, my favorite tea shop, and wherever I happened to stop for errands. My tea shop didn’t have any tips, so I added one, and noticed the optional space for a URL, which seemed like a natural place to link back to the shop’s website.

Here’s where it all gets interesting…

All of the information I added to Foursquare via my Droid is also available in a browser.

Looking at the venue page above for Park Avenue Plastic Surgery & Spa, I can quickly deduce the following:

• Each venue has its own page with a well-optimized, unique title tag
• Keywords are easily added in the form of tags
• The address and location information are prominently displayed and crawlable
• Venue profiles can be linked to Twitter accounts
• URLs can be attached by adding a “Tip” – and it’s a direct, follow link

I also snuck a peek at the code, and it’s as clean as clean gets. It’s kinda beautiful, actually.

Expanding on the idea…

While I was playing with Foursquare and letting it all roll around in my head this weekend, I started plugging Foursquare SEO queries into Google and came up with an October 2009 post from Peter Adams which confirmed that Foursquare’s venue pages are getting crawled. I’ll use his example as proof. Go to Google and search “Grand Sichuan New York”. As of the date of this post their Foursquare venue page is ranking on the first page in Google – just below Yelp and above CitySearch, NYMag and Chow.com.

What does this all mean?

When they say that Foursquare is social media meets local search, baby they ain’t kidding. Their venue pages have already gained “authority site” status, and it’s not a stretch to imagine that Foursquare info may be counting for something in local search apart from the game. The clean, clear address and map hint that a citation is certainly possible. If a lot of people are checking in to a venue, those could be construed as votes in favor that make it more worthy of a higher position in the 7-pack. At the very least, the search engines are taking some serious notice.

And so should we.