Casa Carioka is a hostel based in Rio de Janeiro. The aim of this project was to optimize the website for search engines and performance. To do this we completely overhauled the site, changing the layout from table-based to CSS, changed the use of tags to make the site more accessible for both different browsers and search engines, chose a set of keywords to target for each individual page and ensured that these keywords and the content were both relevant and then finally spent a great deal of time link-building. The site is now listed on all major search engines and has strong placement for search terms such as ‘Casa Carioka’, ‘Casa Carioca’ (a common mis-spelling) and ‘Rio Hostel’. In particular, we increased the placement for ‘Rio Hostel’ from 72nd on Google to it being featured on the 1st page, a difficult task considering how many hostels there are in Rio.

Technologies used: XHTML, CSS, PHP
Work completed: August 2009
casacarioka.com