Journal

Your blog, on your own website address and listed for search engines the day a post goes up. Find it under Website → Journal in your panel's menu.

The reason to bother: almost nobody searches for "wedding photographer". They search for "photographer at Coombe Yarra Valley". A post about a wedding at a named venue is the thing those people actually find.

Write a post

1. Go to Journal.
2. Under Write something, fill in:

- Title — what people see in search results. A name and a place beats "A beautiful day" every time. - Where it was — the venue. Coombe Yarra Valley, *the Abbotsford Convent*. - Town or suburb — where that is. - The first line or two — one or two sentences. They appear in search results and on your journal's list page, so they are worth more care than their length suggests. - The writing — the story of the day. - Photographs from — pick one of your galleries to show its photographs under the post, without uploading them again. Choose None to leave it out.

1. Press Save as a draft.

A draft appears nowhere on your website. Read it through before you save: there is no way to edit a post on this screen once it is saved.

Publish it

Under Everything written, find the post and press Publish. It goes live straight away, and its web address appears under the title. Published posts are listed newest first.

Unpublish takes a post off your website without deleting it. Press Publish again to bring it back.

Why the venue and the town matter

Filled in, they are shown under the post's title and passed to search engines as the place the post is about. That is what turns a post about a wedding into a post about a wedding somewhere. Left empty, the post still works; it just competes with every other post about a wedding.

If you shoot at the same venue often, one good post per venue is worth more than ten general ones.

A note on gallery photographs

Photographs chosen under Photographs from are shown to anyone who reads the post, even if the gallery itself is private. Only pick a gallery your client is happy to have on your website. Photographs in a part of the gallery you have kept for your clients only are left out.

Photographs from only appears once you have at least one client gallery.

The address of a post

The web address comes from the title: A winter wedding at Coombe becomes /journal/a-winter-wedding-at-coombe on your website. If two posts have the same title, the second gets a number on the end. Once a post has been published its address never changes, so links people have shared keep working.

A post is dated the day you first publish it. Unpublishing and publishing it again keeps that first date.

Search engines

Each published post is:

• listed for search engines automatically, with the date it was last updated;
• described to them as an article, with your studio as the author, the dates, the first line or two, and the venue and town as the place it is about;
• on your own website — which is the whole point. A post on somebody else's platform helps their search ranking, not yours.

See being found for the rest of it.