One of the biggest worries people have when thinking about starting a side hustle or part-time website is time. How long will it take? How much work will it need? When will it start making money? Those are fair questions, but they need realistic answers. You are probably not going to start a hobby website … Read more
There is a lot of discussion now about AI search, Google AI Mode, technical SEO, structured content, crawlability, schema, query fan-out, internal links, headings, entities and all the other signals that might help a website be understood. Those things do matter. A website still needs to be accessible. Search engines need to be able to … Read more
Google AI Mode is new, powerful and slightly confusing. That makes it a perfect subject for a small experiment. If someone wants to build a useful online resource explaining Google AI Mode, could they simply ask Google AI Mode what that resource should include? That sounds circular. But it is also very interesting. So I … Read more
Key points: Google’s guidance on AI Mode does not suggest that website owners need a completely new SEO formula. Pages still need to be crawlable, indexable, clear and useful, but there is no special AI Mode file, markup or magic technical switch. The bigger lesson is that guidance should not become a mechanical checklist. Keywords, … Read more
There is a big difference between explaining an idea and showing it. I could write a perfectly competent article explaining what “consensus opinion” means. I could say that consensus opinion is the set of common ideas that appears again and again across search results, AI summaries, forum discussions and mainstream articles. That would be accurate. … Read more
One of the biggest reasons new website owners get discouraged is because they think about the size of the internet. Billions of people are online. Millions of websites already exist. Huge brands, influencers, media companies, YouTube channels, forums, social platforms and AI tools are all competing for attention. When you look at it from that … Read more
The internet can feel like an impossibly large forest. Everywhere you look, there are paths, signs, voices, distractions and established routes. There are huge companies with polished websites, professional publishers with teams of writers, social media platforms, YouTube channels, forums, AI answers and long-established brands. For an evening or weekend website builder, that can feel … Read more
There is a phrase from a recent Wealthy Affiliate post by Kyle that really stopped me in my tracks: “The machine is powerful, but it is aimless without a person pointing it somewhere worth going.” That, to me, sums up one of the most important truths about AI. AI is not useless. Far from it. … Read more
AI search is starting to look complicated. We now hear about AI Mode, AI Overviews, query fan-out, AI citations, prompt tracking, regex filters, visibility reports, and specialist SEO tools that monitor whether your website appears in AI-generated answers. For a hobby website owner, that can feel overwhelming. It can also feel worrying. Whenever search changes, … Read more
I was having a coffee with a friend recently when he told me about one of his gardening experiments. He had started growing carrots inside the cardboard tube inners from kitchen roll. He had glued a base to one end, filled each tube with compost, and popped a carrot seed into each one. I will … Read more