Destination: Barbados

Carolyn and Billy O'Dell are the owners of the premier Bajan catering service, Food Affairs, serving all of Barbados. Their knowledge of area tourism and connections with the island's many hospitality companies have boosted their reputation for personal concierge service among tourists to Barbados. With the idea of sharing this expertise with others interested in traveling to the Caribbean, the O'Dell's launched BarbadosBarbados.com in October, 2005 for the purpose of attracting prospective visitors by offering personalized itineraries and recommendations on villa rentals, dining, and other luxury amentities.

To improve the website's visibility, we took advantage of the O'Dells' knowledge of the island, Bajan cuisine, and acquaintance with the locals. Together with the O'Dells', we contacted tourism websites and local websites to arrange for inbound linking to BarbadosBarbados.com. Our contacts resulted in interest from one Barbados website in doing a feature story on the O'Dells, while area businesses with online presences contacted the O'Dells for possible partnership in their concierge endeavors.

An RSS news feed was set up on the site for the O'Dells to post timely travel offers associated with their site – these included discounts on villa rentals, jazz festival and Cricket World Cup information and packages, etc. This feed was updated and distributed to all RSS search engines, made visible to RSS users seeking pertinent travel information on the Caribbean. We approached one Barbados news website which agreed to post the feed with other Caribbean news tickers.

As Mr. O'Dell often wrote articles relating to Barbados tourism, we set up an account for him at a popular third-party content database where authors submit a variety of articles for other websites and newsletters to use in exchange for proper credit. Mr. O'Dell's articles on the history of the island, island traditions, and recipes from the catering company were posted and made available to others, thereby increasing the site's opportunity for link popularity. As of this writing, Mr. O'Dell's articles have an impressive number of click-throughs to BarbadosBarbados.com.

A pay per click campaign that focused on various aspects of the website's services (villa rentals, Barbados attractions, jazz festival activities, Holder's Season, Cricket World Cup 2007) helped to boost the site's visibility in Google. Five months after launch, Google's PageRank for BarbadosBarbados.com rose from zero to three (the site currently has a PR4). Overall visits to sites have increased steadily since the site's launch, rising from just over a thousand visits in October to almost ten thousand in March, 2006. Today, the O'Dell's have informed us that requests for their concierge services have increased more than tenfold due to our extensive design and SEO efforts, and new business contacts are made frequently via their Web presence. What began as a hobby site has blossomed into a profitable side business for this busy couple.

We helped the O'Dells make a success of their Web venture, and we can do the same for you. Contact us today to learn more about increasing the ROI on an attractive, functional Web site.