The Influence of Our Chinese Website

I closed my report last month with the news that we will soon give our websites a major facelift.  The difficulty of this task may be imagined by comparing it to a tailor making major alterations to a suit of clothing while the gentleman is still wearing it! 

As the facelift may actually cause readership to decline for a period of time, I want to take opportunity in this report to talk about our Chinese website statistics for August.

Total hits on www.smzg.org during August were well over 244,000.  Though this is a large amount of traffic, there was even more traffic during other recent months.  Over forty percent of our August website visitors entered the site directly, i.e., they typed www.smzg.org into their browser.  The front page of our site currently welcomes visitors with a number of photos and articles.  Visitors are free to click on whatever item interests them.

Many people click and listen to our daily broadcast, which we make available on www.smzg.org.  Indeed, via the Internet, people all over the world can access our Chinese program—as well as our broadcasts in other languages!  I visited our websites and listened to audio when I was in Israel in June and when I was in Italy in August.

Other audio available to visitors includes a soundtrack attached to individual articles, as well as the important recordings of Ed Ho reading the Bible (http://www.smzg.org/AudioBible/1NT-Matthew/index.htm).  This Bible reading is a new item on our website, but already a lot of people listen to God’s word via the voice of Ed Ho; in August, we had over 11,000 hits on the Bible reading!

Items that attracted a lot of interest in August included Salina Ho’s series on “My Favorite Scripture” (http://smzg.wcbroadcasting.com/Ho_Salina/Favorite_Scripture/07_Galina_Koval.htm), Ed Ho’s article on the “End of the World”  (http://smzg.wcbroadcasting.com/Ho_Edward/End_of_the_World/01_The_End_of_the_World.htm), and my series of Christian prayers (http://www.smzg.org/Short_Edward/Prayers/Week52PrayerForOurChildren.htm).  

We receive many visitors from other websites who recommend us to their readers.  For example, each month we get several thousand hits because a major religious website in China established a link to our site on their homepage!  Other sites link to us as well.

Many visitors come to www.smzg.org via search engines.  They look up material on any number of international search engines and are sent to our site.  Visitors find us because they type queries into search engines such as Yahoo/China, Baidu, NetEase and others.  The results for each search engine are different and the results may change from day-to-day.  For example, type 无条件的爱 [unconditional love] into the Yahoo/China search engine, and out of over eleven million results, Salina Ho’s article by this name is listed seventh from the top!  (See:  http://www.smzg.org/Ho_Salina/Happy_Family/2010/AgapeInMarriage.htm.)  Type寻求上帝 [search for God] into Yahoo/China and Ed Ho’s article is listed in eleventh place out of almost 5,000 articles (see:  http://www.smzg.org/Ho_Edward/BCC/BCC_01.htm).  Type耶稣是道路、真理、生命 [Jesus is the way, truth, life] into Baidu and Ed Ho’s article is listed in ninth place out of 2,450,000 articles!  (See:  http://www.smzg.org/Ho_Edward/BCC/BCC_06.htm.)  Type祷告词 [prayers] into the Yahoo/China search engine; out of almost 11,000 results, one of the prayers in my series of prayers comes up seventh from the top (http://www.smzg.org/Short_Edward/Prayers/Week001Marriages.htm). 

What preacher in the USA wouldn’t be excited to find his article seventh, ninth or eleventh from the top on a major search engine?!  Ninth place out of 2.45 MILLION articles?!  How can this be???  “This is the Lord’s doing and it is marvelous in our eyes!”

What an exciting time we live in!  Even ten years ago we didn’t imagine what an impact the Internet would make on the world!  We had neither the vision nor the imagination to foresee multiplied thousands of individuals using search engines and finding Bible articles and Bible truth on our Internet site!  The first time I posted an article on www.smzg.org, I had no idea how God would use it or who—if anyone!—would read it.  Since then, Salina, Ed Ho and I have met people in China and in other places who read our articles.  I met a preacher in China who had used my material in his sermons!  We’ve seen our articles copied and posted on OTHER websites!  During no month in 2010 have we have less than 13,000 visits and 225,000 hits on our site!

The Good News is being aired from Alaska via radio (and before long from Madagascar—God willing!), and our programs are also on the Internet.  Surely God is using www.smzg.org!  Praise be to God!