What is the SEO? And what does a pizza have to do with it?

Interesting questions. I am not sure if I know the answers, though. SEO stands for the search engine optimization. Some SEO experts use a pizza as food supply during day. Although not that healthy, it is a good way how to eat regularly and quickly while doing some other stuff - e.g. reading some texts or reviewing an HTML code.

Anyone else find this funny?

Please tell me, does anyone else find this funny at all?

Disclaimer: Fairyland, a kindergarten focused on teaching languages in Ružinov is not a client of ours but Fantasticke, a kindergarten at the edge of Ružinov near the D 1 highway was.

Facebook Gets Quarter of US Pageviews

What are then the pages on Facebook that have the eyeballs? And where can you sign up to advertise on them?

Facebook is a sizzling hot ad platform now and bound to get hotter.

(via MarketingPilgrim via Frank Reed via Henry Blodgett via Perry Drake at Drake Direct, a New York-based database marketing consultancy).

Real time search coming to the spammer near you

You are going to love the polution that will come to Twitter as it begins to be indexed in Bing (joking), GOOGLE.


Will the links count? Links via URL shorteners? @ mentions? RTs?

Will there be a TweetRank score? Measuring the number and quality of your followers or tweets?

Can you replicate this: a man wants to try every pizza in New York

A 26-years old, 5 feet 10, 160-pound man is making the rounds in New York, trying to taste a slice of plain pizza at every pizzeria in the city, the Daily News reports.

He publishes his findings weekly at http://sliceharvester.blogspot.com/ along with photos. Most recent entries cover Basement Pizza & Restaurant on Amsterdam and Presidential Pizza on 125th St.

The man finds the pizza joints using Google Maps. He DJ's too:

5 reasons GUINNESS is Way Overrated

Image via Wikipedia

1. "Guinness to me is like the Dave Matthews Band, They'd both be ok if it weren't for their fans," says Beercraft.

2. "Anyone else like beer but dislike this vile drink?" asks bigcc on bodybuilding.

3. "I'm irish and I don't drink that.. only if im doing car bombs, " replies birdman2.

4. Disapointed wrote on kbinstitute.org "Guiness beer is a McDonald's burger in terms of beer...very unballanced with an overwhelmingly bitter finish."

5. What is your reason?

Google's Chief Economist Hal Varian Explains the Economics of CPC

Professor Varian explains when to raise or lower you cost per click.
Generally, if your value per click is higher than your incremental cost per click you should increase your bid and vice versa.

Pizza SEO is darned important

Image by WOBBLYMOL (FLICKR DOING MY HEAD IN, SO SLOW) via Flickr

Pizza SEO is now even more important than before since search marketing is Domino's Pizza's most powerful acquisition channel in Europe. Robin Auld, Domino's marketing director in the UK tells Marketing Direct (via johnon.com):

In terms of acquisition I would have to say search marketing online – we do pay-per-click (PPC) and also search engine optimisation as well. People go to Google and search for pizza so it’s important that Domino’s is up there.

Moreover, he says Domino's has been cruising unscathed through the recession so far as people trade down to pizza delivery (with their own wine, presumably) from meals out at restaurants.

Although he does not say explicitly, he points to how meaningful "day-parting" can be in all of Domino's marketing channels: TV and door-dropped menus heavy towards the end of the week, when people are at home "thinking pizza".

Domino's segments customers by behaviour (e.g. hardcore loyals) rather than by "artificial" criteria such as age or location. They track ordering behaviour by phone number.

A house in Europe for $10,000

Image by bill barber (very sporadic) via Flickr

Can you get a house in Europe for under $10k??? Sure you can! In much of former Soviet Union, former Yugoslavia and the rest of east and central Europe can you find houses for double-digit dollar figures.

This is true in many rural areas.

FAQ
Can Pizza SEO help find a property in Europe?
Sorry, no. At least not at this time (as of time of writing).

Can you assist with real estate and legal aspects?
Again, no.

How much can I expect real estate value in Central Europe and Eastern Europe to increase in the next year or two?
Hard to tell at this stage. Past returns do not guarantee future performance and vice versa.

Is there a contact person for North America?
We value the Slovak communities and their friends in both the USA and Canada. We extend our greetings across the ocean. At the moment we do not have a dedicated contact but feel free to contact us at our regular coordinates.

How often is this information updated?
Only ocasionally. Last updated less than 2 weeks ago.

Pizza SEO will SEO for pizza

The crisis is here and members of Pizza SEO team will do SEO for a pizza, we overheard recently. If this fact is true or it is a joke, we can't really tell.

British TV Watchdog Slams Pizza in Simpsons

Domino Pizza's sponsorship of the TV show The Simpsons violates UK rules regarding promoting high fat, salt and sugar foods, Ofcom watchdog was reported as saying.

Although pizza is not presented on the show, it shows preparation, packaging, waiting for delivery, etc. This sidesteps the regulations but is clearly in violation of their spirit.

Domino's reportedly ended it sponsorship of the Simpsons in late 2008.

They should put Pizza makes you fat warning on boxes.

You need not apply to fly American Airlines!

Only residents of about 40 nations qualify to use the American Airlines site: I landed on this flashpage and was asked to enter a country of residence. Except my country was not there. Now what? Major #fail.

Calculus and Pizza: a calculus intro textbook to consider

Cover via Amazon

For the hungry mind, by the amazing Clifford Pickover (HT 37), Calculus and Pizza. This is a guide to calculus that even left brained people can understand.

Of course, the connection between calculus and SEO is tenuous, at best. Effectively, though, the notion of omptimisation features prominently in both.

URL Shortening Metaservice - a random idea for 2009

How about someone make this app? A URL Shortening services meta site with some of the 100+ existing free services (this is a good start but there are probably many more). Perhaps with a unified interface (i.e. a scraper site).

You feed in a url and 100+ variations appear:
Would you like to visit www.x.se/53nx or does is.gd/ey92 sound better? We even scored a http://½.ws/7 (29 more and 37 can sign up for his).

You could even create looong shortened URL chains - not sure whether there would be any real use may be artistic value.

If you have a crazy idea like this, it's cheaper to make it happen in 2009 so you should really look into it. You can then mash it up with twitter or whatever the application de jour will be, make it send out SMS (before they cancel the 160 character limit).

Pizza prank video for Pizza Hut making the viral rounds

A viral video by Mediocre Films for Zadby for Pizza Hut: two guys go around getting kicked out from pizza parlours for getting pizza delivered there.

Zadby seems to have a great concept: it posts a Commission ($8,000 from Pizza Hut in this case) and lets producers on the site compete for it. Mediocre Films picked up this one and may be getting more dough if Pizza Hut decides to distribute the video on its own site.

I don't particularly like the video because it's simply based on someone being rude to unsuspecting business owners (unless, of course it's staged, which it could be given the camera work) but I love the Zadby concept and I think it's a great mechanism for getting videos produced efficiently.

Anyone know where this ties into the Pizza Hut brand?

Papa John's Gets Killer ROI With Free Pizza Offer

The chain ran an image ad on the Google PPC system offering a free medium cheese pizza for people who register to get their emails.

You may be surprised to hear the promotion "worked" - Papa John's display ads on the Google network resulted in a 15-20% increase in weekend sales.

Earlier, the pizza chain went to 152,000 friends on Facebook from about 10,000 in two days, offering a two-for-one for anyone who befriends them.

Aparently, mobile ads are the next frontier - Papa John's Pizza plans a flash promotion around New Year 2008.

Overjoyed to see Overmortal back in the SERPs

It's not the top spot but ranking as #23 in the search engine results for your own name is much better than being nowhere. Especially if you are a company that (in its own words)

gets the right search placement for your business.

It seems the main problem was with botched (or missing) redirects - the content of overmortal.net was identical to overmortal.com.

Any "blackhat" SEO patron could tell you that, even the "whitehats" know: Duplicate content can hurt your search engine positions. If you have identical content on several domains or several pages, make sure to redirect or nofollow appropriately.

A good SEO consultant can help you make sure a domain change or URL structure change won't make your site disappear from the search engine results. This does not involve the creation of any useful new content yet generates genuine value for companies.

P.S. Our offer of a free effective web audit for Overmortal still holds. Even with the redirect from overmortal.net to overmortal.com in place we believe you would find our report valuable (we go beyond SEO, making actionable recommendations on website usability and accessibility).

Overmortal: an Apology

Wars have collateral damage - civilians get hit by stray bullets and are even sometimes targetted on purpose. But imagine a civilian picking up a gun in the middle of the war and shooting a few rounds at the heavily armed soldiers passing by.

That is kind of what happened to Overmortal here: they took a swipe at Pizza SEO in the middle of the Pizza SEO wars and since Pizza SEOs never pull their punches, Overmortal was hit by a bullet or two.

By no means was it Pizza SEO's intention to take the first spot for searches for Overmortal in just over a month. As of right now though, this pathetic blog hosted on Google's free blogger service ranks first and the actual Overmortal site went MIA.


And no folks, it's not because of Google personalised results (Justin Boland style).

We apologise to Overmortal in all sincerity! Sadly, it seems this is not a proof of our skills but reflection of a problem with the Overmortal website - it does not rank anywhere in the top 10 for its own name (since they are not a SEO company, we should not hold them to too high of a standard - they shouldn't be expected to rank first for their name but they still should probably be in the top 10).

At Pizza SEO we have helped clients in this situation - usually a problem within the site causes Google to de-index or penalize it. Effective Web Audit, our introductory services offering a half day of consulting time, should identify the problem and recommend a fix. In addition it will provide actionable recommendations on on-site and off-site ranking factors, basic usability and accessibility.

We would like to offer Overmortal a free Effective Web Audit (an EUR 350 value) to make up for the damage we have caused. Let us know by email, through the form on our website or in blog comments here, if you would like to take us up on the offer.

Pizza SEO welcomes Justin Boland on board

About time for Justin Boland, the other Pizza SEO to acknowledge that he is neither the ONE, nor one of two, but one of at least three Pizza SEOs (who do not pull their punches).

Indeed, the Slovak usurpers have had to hire additional staff (Andrej Salner) to deal with the onslaught from Justin, a Vermont-based power weirdo. Let us hope Justin's prank does not end up bankrupting the small Slovak SEO company - that would put a premature stop to the international exchange.

It is now clear: there is more to come in the Pizza SEO Wars and it will only get more entertaining.

Pizza.info for sale through multiforum auction

The importance of domains in search engine marketing has not received the attention it deserves on this blog (for obvious reasons). As an opening into this vast field we offer this piece of domaining intelligence:

The domain PIZZA.INFO has gone on sale on November 24 through a multi-forum auction (see the thread at DNforum).

This domain could be used for a multitude of purposes:
- a directory of pizza restaurants, parlors, delivery services, etc.
- a portal on pizza
- pizza recipes
- a whole another purpose not directly related to Pizza (Pizza SEO?)

In 2001 the domain reportedly sold for $4,010 (via NP) and in April this year it went for EUR 12,000 on Sedo. There is no telling where the auctions ends up now, though the financial crisis may obviously slow the bidding somewhat.

Pizza.com recently sold for a sum of $2.6 million, which many commentators considered a steal.