The Florida Dance Web (FDW) was created on 24 February, 1998. It's purpose is to promote the square and round dance activities in the state of Florida on an international basis. The plan was to create a web of individual sites all linked together to accomplish this goal.

We then obtained permission to design web sites for the Florida Federation of Square Dancers, the Round Dance Council, the Florida Caller's Association, the Florida Association of Single Square and Round Dancers, Bow and Swing magazine and numerous vendors, dance halls and clubs. We also added information services such as a calendar of events, a weekend specials page, a links page to other square dance sites and a news section on the front page to chronicle current events in the world of square dancing.

But a web site is useless unless it is viewed by the intended audience so, the promotion of our site began. Through a series of contacts with newsletters, web sites and other organizations worldwide, we have succeeded in our goal.

As of this writing (Nov 23, 2005), the Florida Dance Web has received over

100,000 visitors for the year (2005) and they visited 188,000 pages. Here are the stats. on some individual sites

• Round Dance Council = 3350
• Square Dance Federation = 3284
• Clubs = 3313
• Granada Squares = 2176

In addition to US visitors, we have had visitors from The Netherlands, Australia, Canada, Japan, Germany, The United Kingdom, Denmark and Italy.

The role that search engines play in a site's popularity has been proven time and again. If you want a lot of visitors, you must have a high ranking in the most popular search engines. To achieve this ranking requires many hard hours of study and work to design a search engine friendly web site. People who are interested in square dancing in Florida will enter a search term such as Florida square dancing in Google, Yahoo or one of the other top search engines and the search engine will provide links to sites related to that subject. Here are the results from a few of the top search engines when we enter the phrase "florida square dancing" All results are on the first page.

• All The Web - FDW #1 - Federation #3
• Alta Vista - FDW #1 - Federation #3
• AOL - FDW #1 - Federation #2
• Ask Jeeves - FDW #1 - Rounds #2 - Granada Squares - #8
• Google - FDW #1 - Federation #2
• MSN - FDW #1
• Yahoo - FDW #1 - Federation #2