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Four
years ago Wohlmut Media Services participated in the
founding of a nonprofit (501)(c)(3) organization called
the Stepfamily Network. Using our own web design and
content development skills, we birthed this educational
resource for families into cyberspace. Entirely web-based,
the Stepfamily Network (www.stepfamily.net)
helps educate and support a worldwide audience with
more than 180,000 hits or approximately 20,000 page
impressions a month. Our visitors come from as far
away as Sweden, Saudi Arabia, Australia, and Japan.
It's
been an interesting, challenging journey to build
this audience. How did we do it? First, we constructed
content relevant to audience need. The Stepfamily
Network has a bookstore, helpful articles, a forum
page, and more that have very strong appeal to our
audience.
Next,
before any web site is launched, it's vital to get
just the right "meta-tags." Meta-tags are
those key words hidden in HTML code that search engines
pick up on. Then comes submitting the site to various
search engines themselves. As a result of these efforts,
the Stepfamily Network is listed in the top 10 results
whenever the word "stepfamily" is typed
in a search engine.
The
efforts of building a site are continuous and on-going.
Every month we compile statistics
on the site's usage that give valuable information.
Such as which are the most popular pages; what hours
of the day receive the most traffic; etc. And just
recently Socratic
Technologies conducted a survey of the site's
users that resulted in a 60-page report. All of this
research has helped us refine the site to be even
better and more useful to its audience.
Has
it been worth all the effort? When we get back testimonials
like these, the spiritual answer is a resounding yes!
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