Last week Pineberry proudly launched three microsites:

Pineberry.net (only in Swedish)

At Pineberry.net you can get an eye examination SEO-style.

Pineberry.info

Pineberry.info explains the very intriguing history regarding the origin of the famous pineberry.

Pineberry.biz

Do you have a craving for Pineberry Jam? Then Pineberry.biz is the absolute right place to visit.

Enjoy!

/Pineberry

Why set up an iGaming Company in Malta?

The sunny Mediterranean island of Malta makes the perfect destination for your iGaming business. Remote gaming companies have been flooding into Malta in the last few years due to the favourable taxation and licensing laws. As a result, Malta enjoys a bustling and burgeoning gaming community that is only enhanced by the fantastic climate and social nature of the island. Regular industry events encourage sharing of knowledge and passion amongst iGaming professionals which serves to promote the industry as a whole and create a strong business network. We get lots and lots of questions of how you set up a company in Malta so here is a short FAQ.

How do I register my iGaming company? Registering a remote gaming company is fairly straight forward. You need to get an application form from the Lotteries and Gaming Authority (LGA) of Malta. They can be found at www.lga.org.mt and the form can be downloaded from here. You will need to check that your main business will be operational in Malta or you may run into problems. Support functions such as call centres can be outside of the island but core functions must be based in Malta for successful registration. The registration process has a non-refundable fee attached to it, paid on submission of your application. You should be aware that even if your registration gets rejected, you will not be reimbursed.

What documentation do I need? Along with your registration application you will need to provide personal documentation such as passport or ID, original birth certificate and acquire a police conduct report from the Malta constabulary. In addition, you must submit your business plan and declarations from all shareholders. All of this is clearly listed on the LGAs site.

How will my iGaming company be assessed? On receipt of your application, the LGA will investigate the financial viability of your company. If you are found capable to run an iGaming business in Malta, you will receive a first stage approval letter. You are free to start operating in Malta on receipt of this letter. However, this is a provisional license and you will be assessed further by an LGA compliance officer. They will be assessing whether your processes, procedures, systems and third party agreements are compliant with Malta business requirements. If all the above meet with approval you will receive your full license.

How long will it take to get my iGaming license? The initial application stage will take around six weeks but the period of assessment by the LGA compliance officer will be a three month probationary period. However, if any of your information is missing or incomplete this could see significant delay to your application. It is important to check you have been thorough and clear with all information submitted.

How much tax will I pay? Your tax band will be dictated by the class of operating license you apply for. There are four classifications with definitions that best describe your business. You will notice differences between lotteries, spread betting companies, betting exchanges, remote gaming definitions and software vendors. Again, all information is on the LGA’s site but it is best to seek some advice if you are unsure as to how your company is categorised.

Can I get help with my application? Yes. The LGA provide a lot of information and you will be assigned an officer who will deal with your case. However, if you need more advise before you start your application process in order to ensure it goes through smoothly, there are a lot of Maltese law firms who are set up to deal specifically with company formation in Malta. The number of iGaming companies setting up on the island means the local law firms have become very well versed in iGaming law and advice.

If you need help with company formation in Malta or you want to apply for a LGA License you know where to start.

We have developed an SEO Tool for analysis of your on page ranking factors for a specific page vs a specific keyword. True, there are a lot of SEO tools out there but to be honest, most of them are not really doing the trick. Most of them are actually built by people that don’t really know that much about SEO. This is the reason we chose to build this, most accurate tool available.

It’s completely free so test it as much as you want.

Thruth to be told there are not that many SEO companies with local presence in Malta. That’s one of the main reasons we decided to set upp a Malta-Office. The amount of Software and Internet companies on the island is surely a good reason for a Malta SEO company. 

There are many reasons for wanting your SEO-consultant nearby. On is the possibility to actually meet. Talking and discussing changes in strategy or changes on the website is essential for a successful SEO and this is so much easier done face to face. Not having the disadvantage of time difference is another good reason. 

Part 2 of the SEO school. 

On Page SEO can seem like the trickiest part but it is actually rather easy. The On Page SEO means the part of the SEO where you work with the site itself. By building orr re-building the site properly you will improve the possibillities to reach good positions in the search engines. If you do the following steps you should be all right.

Is the site indexable?

Can Google fins all your pages? You can do a quick check by typing site:yourdomain.com in Googles search to see all the indexed pages you have. 

To make sure Google can find all your pages you need to have proper links to all of them. If you use Frames this is a bit tricky as the pages does not get unique URLs. You should avoid using frames. Java- or Flashnavigation is also a problem and if you do use one of these make sure that you have a backup navigation that Google and the visitors that doesn’t allow that kind of scripts can use. 

Is every page unique?

Every page on the site needs to be unique and have it’s own content. URL:s, Titles, headlines and text all need to be unique for each subpage. 

Do you have proper titles and headlines?

All the important tags on each page needs to reflect the content of that page. Most important are Titles and H1 but all the others matter too. H2-H6, Meta Description, Meta Keywords, the internal links pointing to the page and the text on the page needs to reflect what you want to say with that page. Even Alt-tags and Titles on pictures should be relevant.

If you make sure your site lives up to these criterias you are a long way. There is of course more to do but we will get back to that in the advanced SEO School. 

Part one of the seo.com.mt SEO School.
Before you start with the actual work you need to decide what keywords you are going for. This is extremely important because sometimes it might be hard to change your mind in retrospect. For example if you get permanent links from Link-catalogues such as DMOZ it can be almost impossible to get them to change the link text. Chosing keywords is one of the tougher parts with SEO as there are many different factors that matters, the search demand on the specific keyword, the competition and the quality (for you) on the visitors from that keyword.
The search demand is fairly easy to find out if you have a little time and are prepared to spend a little money. Set up an Adwords campaign on Google and choose to only have your ads shown in the search results. Set it to all the interesting keywords and wait for a week or two. You can now see how many times your add hasa been shown on each keyword. This is not an exact figure of the search demand as your add might not always be shown but it is the absolutely best. Other methods can be checking Overture (they give you an estimate of the demand in their network) and Googles keyword selector tool (it is pretty rough but can at least give you ideas of where to start). Google Trends is useful for comparing keywords to each other as it shows the difference between the selected keywords.
The competition is a bit tricky, you have to try to evaluate how good your opponents have done their optimization, how much strength their sites have and if it might be possible for you (for a reasonable cost) to beat them. The quickest way is simply checking their PageRank, You can see it if you have the Google Toolbar installed. The problem with this method is that it is very inaccurate, Google doesn’t really use PageRank that way anymore and there are lots and lots of examples where pages with less PageRank are a lot harder to overtake than the pages with higher PR. The proper way of doing it is getting a look at their source code (if you use Firefox just right click on the page and View Source) and how their site looks in general, combine this with the inbound links you find and make your own estimate. This can be extremely time consuming, especially if you have a lot of interesting keywords. I’m going to give you a few shortcuts to speed up your competition research.
The first shortcut. If Wikipedia is visible on the front page the competition is generally weaker. Wikipedia have a page for a whole lot of search results and have a high level of general SEO. On high competition keywords Wikipedia have a harder time to compete though as the amount of inbound links to each article is usually not very high. This is not alway true, there are a few keywords where wikipedia is extremely strong.
The second Shortcut. Check in DMOZ for the top results. If they are listed in DMOZ the competition is harder. This is not always true but it can definately be a shortcut.
The third shortcut. Check the inbound links with the help of Yahoo siteexplorer. Simply type Linkdomain:thedomain.com -domain:thedomain.com. Yahoo will show you the amount of inbound links, a large amount is definately a sign of a strong site.
The quality of the visitors is a it harder to figure out because it is more of a human matter. There are lots of things you can do with your site to increase the conversion rate of your visitors but this guide is about getting the best visitors from the search engines and doesn’t have room for lengthy conversion rate discussions. In general we can say that a keyword that is very close to the product or service you sell will convert better. Blue hankerchiefs will convert better then hankerchiefs if it is blue hankerchiefs you sell. If you sell red though it will convert a lot less. Look out for the ”free” keywords, Free Poker for example will get you insane amounts of visitors but you won’t make much money from them, online poker is just slightly less when it comes to traffic and they will be ready to pay a lot more.

We are launching the site seo.com.mt today. We are happy to announce that at the same time as launching the site we have opened our office in St Julians, Malta. The Malta Office is a local Maltese office of Pineberry. We will offer SEO services locally in Malta from now on as well as in Stockholm. We are of course still optimizing for the international market but now with presence in Malta as well.