With Malta’s recent growth of their overseas and igaming companies, Essio Marketing Ltd is following this trend and positioning itself in Malta to develop partners of the future. For me personally, this is a dream come true being half Maltese, and opening our first overseas office in my home country.

In the past three months throughout the summer I have been travelling to and fro from Malta, having numerous meeting with senior members of the business community, networking and building good relationships. There is a buzz in Malta at the moment and the business community, whether local or foreign, have a very positive outlook for the future. The senior managers and owners that I met in Malta want to get involved, want to understand the process of internet marketing; which is amazing as this interest and co-operation allows us to be inventive and explore new avenues due to the greater insights we gain from a more in-depth understanding.

One of Essio’s greatest assets, which will benefit us in Malta is that we maintain very good relationships with our current clients/business partners. To accentuate this point we have always had a very good retention of clients, clients who have been with us from when the company started over 2 years ago. Our ability to communicate our ideas, our openness, and our results driven attitude as well as our client relationship are what I foresee being key factors for success in Malta.

One of my business partners and co-founders John Liptrot said “This is amazing news for the company, and for me personally as I was born and bred here in St Helens.  I visited Malta when I was in the Navy fifteen years ago and I loved it, and to now know that our company Essio Marketing Ltd is representing my home town of St Helens in Malta is just amazing. We know it’s going to be hard work, but we’re prepared for that, and we look forward to it.”

Our new office is based in Conception Street, Zurrieq, strategically placed 10 minutes from the Airport and just 20 minutess from the capital Valletta.  Our website will be updated with the office full contact details within the next week and we have a new website being launched primarily for Malta within the next 4-6 weeks.

Our new office manager in Malta, Cheryl Williams is currently preparing seminars that are due to be held in the New Year to introduce our services to the business community. If you require any information regarding the Maltese office or services we provide please email me on: chris.williams@essio-marketing.co.uk or you can email Cheryl directly on cheryl@essio-marketing.co.uk.

Kate has decided to take the plunge and start her own ‘Hypnotherapy Clinic ‘in the fabulous location of Rainford close to both St Helens and Wigan. Kate will be offering a range of therapies including Adult and Child Hypnosis, Past Life Therapy and Parapsychology. These therapies are designed to help everything from increasing self esteem and confidence through to resolving unwanted habits, fears and phobias.

Essio would like to offer Kate the very best of fortune and success in her new venture and thank Kate once again for choosing Essio Marketing for her Web Design and Online Marketing requirements.

Getting your website seen is undoubtedly the most crucial part of having a business website online. If you intend on doing a lot of hard marketing and intend to gain traffic in the short and long term solely by these methods and links from other websites, then you can just concentrate on getting your website looking and functioning the way that you desire.

However, if you are someone that wants to make the most of the online traffic that is available, then there are a few boxes that need to be ticked. Most importantly, can your website be found and read by the search engines? Many websites have features in place that can reduce your website’s visibility or, in some cases, eliminate its visibility altogether.

The first thing to consider is what words or phrases should bring searchers to your website; these words are your ‘keywords’. Carry out thorough keyword research before making any changes to your website the following article will help you to choose keywords with commercial value to your business; Target Keywords with Commercial Value. Once you are happy with the chosen keywords ensure that they appear in important sections of your website such as;

Meta Tags
Whilst viewing your website, click view from the browser menu then view ‘Page Source’, you should find Meta Tags located between the HEADER tags (). These are the primary points for search engines to read and establish a page’s readability and contents value to its users.

Robots
The ‘robots’ Meta Tags can instruct the search engines whether or not to read the content. If this Tag does not exist within the website code, then the default ‘index and follow’ applies. If this Tag is present with content such as “no index” or “no follow”, then this particular page will restrict search engines ability to view and index your content.

Title
This is not an actual Meta Tag, but is closely associated and so is treated like one by many designers and internet marketers. The title, located between the TITLE Tags (), will appear within the tab of the webpage when opened. The title is easily edited, but some companies choose to just fill these with words such as “home page” or “about us”, which is not very descriptive to the search engines, and can increase the difficulty in getting your website promoted through the search results. A better option is to use words or phrases relating to your website i.e. keywords that you wish to be found for on search engines. Ensure that the keywords are both relevant to your content and that they also appear in your content; this will help you to rank higher for relative keywords on search engines.

Description
The description tag (“description”) works on two fronts. Firstly it is used for the search engines to better understand the content of a page; secondly it is used as the paragraph which will be displayed in the search results. A lot of thought needs to be put into this section, firstly, to ensure that is it descriptive as well as inviting to visitors to increase the clicks through to your website.

Flash versus XHTML

Flash can not exist on a website without HTML or XHTML, so there is not an actual Flash-only choice. However with websites primarily using flash for a website, the content can be unreadable and so will not do well when trying to rank in the search engines. There are tools available that allow you to see what the search engines see, a good and free tool to use is Yellowpipe Lynx Viewer which can be downloaded at Yellowpipe Lynx Viewer.

It is recommended to have an XHTML site that has small sections of flash content embedded. This allows you to benefit from the visual appeal of flash but benefit from optimised content from the XHTML to increase the traffic to your website.

Within an XHTML website, there any many factors that attribute a readable site, such as limited or no use of tables and inline frames (iframes). This does get technical and can become very complicated. In its simplicity the less code-to-content ratio, the better; but it is advisable to contact a professional SEO Company/designer to establish the quality of the website code.

La Bella Bridal is a valued customer of Essio’s and it has been a privilege to watch and help them grow. Having initially struggled to make any impact at all online with their brand new flash website, La Bella’s owners Ian and Josie, approached Essio interested in our SEO Services and Pay Per Click management, with one objective in mind; ‘to get to page one on Google for the search phrase ‘wedding Dresses Exeter’.  This initial objective, after thorough research and consultation was then developed to encompass a broad selection of keywords that where both relative to La Bella’s products as well as their location. For example ‘bridal shop Exeter’, ‘mother of the bride Devon’, ‘wedding dresses south west’ etc, we decided to target all relative keywords to ensure a good return on investment for our SEO Level 1.

Page 1 ranking on Google, Yahoo and MSN’s search engines was achieved for all keywords within a three month period at which stage La Bella decided to upgrade to SEO level 2 and target more competitive keywords. With traffic steadily increasing from two hundred visits a month up to over five thousand visits a month La Bella increased the level of SEO to target the highest level national keywords such as ‘mother of the bride’ and ‘wedding dresses’ and to have a full re design carried out by Essio.

Recently Essio achieved high Google rankings for both ‘mother of the bride’ and ‘wedding dresses’ increasing monthly visits to over 15,000 whilst achieving a bounce rate of less than 10%. We felt that in order to fully take advantage of this level of visits and interaction a new strategy was necessary. Through close liaison between our team and La Bella’s owners it was agreed that an online shopping facility offering a range of high quality Wedding Accessories and handmade Wedding Jewellery would offer the ideal service to accompany the clothing range already available.

We are pleased to report that La Bella’s online shop was launched and ready for business on Monday 30^th November with an initial selection of quality wedding accessories and jewellery. We aim to have over three hundred products live before Christmas ready for the annual New Year surge in interest from next year’s brides to be. I’d just like to finish by thanking Ian and Josie for their continued faith and loyalty and wish them as much success in 2010 as was achieved in 2009.