Guides / tutorials

I try and open source as much of my work as possible. With that in mind, here are guides to building, editing, and promoting some of the types of sites I've made - tattoo shops, tradespeople, small businesses, community directories. Most of the examples on my portfolio are built on the open source Chobble Template, so the code you read alongside these guides is the code that actually runs my client sites. It's all free - like the videos, this used to sit behind a Patreon, and that's wound down.

The topics lean towards the practical end: structuring your site so it's easy to navigate, writing pages Google can tell are genuinely useful without tipping into keyword stuffing, finding backlinks worth having, targeting the towns you actually cover, and setting up free tools like Google Search Console and SerpBear to track your own rankings. There's a fair bit about using AI effectively too, and about critiquing its output, because it's confidently wrong more often than people expect.

The honest caveat: I'm a working web developer sharing what works for my clients, not an SEO agency with a research department, and search advice ages - anything here that sounds out of date probably is, so tell me and I'll update. If you'd rather someone just did the work, that's what my websites are for; if you want a hand applying any of it, working through these guides comes as part of hosting (the free advice service is here). And if you want to know whether the advice works, client reviews are here.

The guides

Each guide has its own page, and the companion videos cover some of the same topics if you'd rather watch.

If you'd like a website built with this kind of open approach, fill in the form below and I'll reply within 48 hours.