Websites and SEO | The SMH archive

Jeff Maeck needed one fast home for his brands, courses, events and content. I built his link-in-bio website with Astro, Cloudflare and plenty of personality.

How would you write for a computer if you knew how it read?

A comprehensive DIY guide to making sure your webite appears where it should in search results on search engines and AI chatbots.

There's a lot of here-say about Google and search engine optimisation. This is what's actually published by Google about SEO.

Expired domains get registered for SEO value—it's standard practice. Learn why it happens, the Australian rules, and how to protect your domain from expiry.

Instagram has always felt like a bit of a closed shop when it comes to being found, aka search, aka search engine optimisation. Great for visibility inside the actual Instagram app, sure, but outside? Crickets. That’s

Build your own fast, customisable, and tracking-free link in bio website using Astro — no coding experience needed. Step-by-step setup, GitHub sync, and free deployment via Netlify, Vercel, or Cloudflare Pages.

Discover the exact website structure that converts browsers into bookings. Step-by-step guide to arranging your celebrant pages.

The story of building The Togetherness Collective website for my friend Jeff, showcasing how personal connections can lead to successful client relationships.

Discover how to optimise your business website for AI search and answer engines like ChatGPT and Perplexity

How do you know if it's a good website? Explore comprehensive website quality metrics from Ahrefs, Moz, PageSpeed Insights, Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools.

Discover how to effectively link out from your website with our comprehensive guide to outbound linking strategies.

When website owners first encounter Moz's Spam Score, it can trigger immediate anxiety. After all, nobody wants their legitimate business website associated with spam! However, this metric isn't meant to label your site as spam but rather to highlight characteristics that correlate with penalised domains.

Discover why linking out from your celebrant website to other quality resources actually improves your SEO, builds industry relationships, and helps potential clients see you as a trusted wedding expert. Learn practical linking strategies that can boost your online presence and attract more bookings.

There's an easy way to win online today if you optimise your website for the search- and answer-engines.

I just prepared this audit for someone else and through it might be helpful to you.

Six weeks ago I built a website on a new domain name and got these awesome results early on.

A quick explainer on what a backlink is.

It turns out that SEO - search engine optimisation - and GEO - geerative engine optimisation - isn't some big scary black box, they actually publish how to win on their own websites.

When you're building your celebrant website, you’re crafting the digital front door to your business, the handshake before you meet your couple. And like any good intro, it needs to do more than look good—it needs to wor

If you're a wedding celebrant looking to improve your online presence and attract more couples, here’s a straightforward SEO content strategy you can use to make your website more visible on Google and Bing. If things ar

My current obsession is figuring out how the different AI systems know what they know, then working that to my advantage.

Friends of mine recently lost their website because the domain name expired. They claimed it was stolen. I would claim they didn't take the responsibility requi...

Viewing a Friend A's business website with Friend B, Friend B thought there was a lot of text.

This week saw the 28th user of Instagram - that's right, he's been using Instagram for longer than everyone except for 27 other people - get locked out of his Instagram because an automatic content checker deemed that he

Any fool with a Squarespace website and a Google Ads account can start a business. Our society puts so much value on starting, and perhaps its rightly so.

A comedian I follow on Threads recently posted

Silvia asks: I really want to find out how to start a website when you haven't done any weddings yet. I've looked at many celebrant's websites and find myself overwhelmed. Starting out can be hard, but rest assur

In February 2024 Google and Yahoo's email divisions implemented big changes to how emails could be delivered and if they would be deemed spam or junk mail.

Of the 8.5 billion searches a day on Google, 680 million of them, eight percent, are questions.

I woke up this morning to a flurry of text messages from friends about how Instagram and Facebook was down. One of the friends is someone I've been telling for ...

It can be a bit lonely here in self-employment and solo-employment land, that's why I created the Campfire link in email footer, but I also love your email repl...

Many of us still get SEO confused, so Neil Patel&39;s advice on using Google&39;s LLM chatb...

If I visit your wedding officiant website, in the first moments can I determine:

In 1997 the term "web log " was shortened to blog and ever since common people like you and I have had the power to write and publish on the internet. For the longest time it was the only way you shared your mission, your

Go to any wedding celebrant's website and there's a 50% chance that somewhere on the front page they'll say something like "your wedding your way " which is lovely and kind. Of course, the customer is always right as Harr

It was about 4pm in the afternoon here in Mexico and I had just emptied my inbox, a noble task in 2023, and the email came in. The email that scares me the most: my main domain name's renewal had failed due a credit card

Elaine asks: When I obtained my Domain Name of domainname.com.au from Melbourne IT when I first started back in 2014, I was ‘advised’ to secure domainname.net and domainname.com too, to prevent ‘others’ from setting

Every day I wake up and check the technology news - as is my habit - and scroll through the headlines I'm expecting to find a marriage celebrant in there. Why?

Suzanne asks: "Looking for advice on professional web design v. self design. Objective to attract biz, be good return on investment and not rubber-stamp like. Also some good advice on logo vs personal service brand. " Two

A study has found that adding copy to a new app's website around the lines of "we expect 1000 users to join this year " increased signups for the app by 20%. People respond to the developer's expectations and intentions o

Continuing a long running series on this website starting with how your price is part of your marketing story, whether or not you should list your prices on your website with answers from Sarah and myself, how to respo

If you've taken our branding advice before, you're using the same headshot profile photo for your social media accounts and your website, and anywhere else you can upload an identifying photo, avatar, logo. But do you kn

Your Facebook page, Instagram page, Google My Business account, your LinkedIn, and god forbid any of you have a Parler account, but they're all not your property. Running your business on the back of those properties is

Google, in light of legislation being introduced in Australia, has threatened to pull out of the Australian market. I'm sure they won't, if only because they won't walk away and leave $59 billion of income on the table a

Sarah chats to Tasmanian celebrant Kathleen Pavlic-Ryan about the brand new online registration system available through Births, Deaths, and Marriages Tasmania!

There's a new fact sheet on the Attorney-General's department website on correcting marriage paperwork, and it's an important read. We're copying and pa

222 reasons why professionally operating marriage celebrants should secure their domain name registrar account and make sure their domain name is on auto renew.

11 years ago (in 2009), celebrant directory website Celebrante, conducted a survey of about 1400 celebrants. I’m cleaning out my Dropbox folder and found the survey, so I thought it’d be an interesting piece of qua

A really powerful way for you to spend your time and energy whilst weddings are essentially furloughed, is to evaluate, reevaluate, and evaluate even more, your current business systems and marketing strategies. I like t

Jeff asks: When you look back on leads, what seems to be working? Do you have a rough breakdown of where/how couples are finding you? Do you find Instagram/Facebook ads work? Venue referrals? The Google...?

The most popular question I’m asked in person by my wedding industry colleagues, and here on , is which website do I advertise on or which directory do I list in that works? Somewhere along

As you're viewing this blog post you'll note that in the URL bar, the part where you type the blah blah blah dot com bit, next to the domain name 'your website' you'll see a little padlock???? icon that is a sign

Everyone knows a guy who knows a guy who can get you on the front page of Google. I'd argue that you might not want to be on the front page of Google for everything, but it doesn't hurt for the right people to be able to

Mark asks, I was hoping you could explain the etiquette for posting photos on your Website, Facebook and Instagram account when supplied by a professional photographer please.

Emma asks To squarespace or not to squarespace? What are your tips for starting a website? This article has the opportunity to be a long and nerdy one, so I'm going to be purposely brief so that you can make an edu

Amber asks Leading from the price on website debate - how do you answer the "How much do your services cost? " enquiry? I try to start a conversation and speak about value and the experience but sometimes it is just frust

A quick and easy weekend exercise for everyone today: read the front page of your website and your about page. Look at your recent social media posts and your bios on the networks. Are you talking about the product or th

Ella asks: "Price points seem to be a hot topic everywhere… Would you recommend putting your fees on your website? Some celebrants display their price on their website, others don’t. Some also seem to provide services ch

Celebrants offer such a personal service, your service is very different to mine, to every other member of this website, and the thousands of other celebrants available. We can communicate our differences in text and pho

This website exists for celebrants who struggle with their competence. It's ok, you're not alone in thinking "maybe I could do better." Marriage celebrancy is my full time job, it's all I do, and more often than not