Don’t Let Google Ignore Your Blog: Master Technical SEO Basics
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| Mastering technical SEO ensures your blog is fast, mobile-friendly, and Google-ready. |
Technical SEO Basics for Bloggers
I remember the first time I heard the term “technical SEO.” I’d been blogging for maybe a year, feeling pretty confident because I knew about keywords, titles, and writing decent meta descriptions. Someone mentioned “technical SEO” in a Facebook group for bloggers and I nodded along like I understood, then quietly Googled it later. The search results made it sound like you needed to be part coder, part engineer, and maybe part wizard.
The truth is, you don’t. At least, not if you’re a blogger. You don’t need to rebuild WordPress from scratch or write your own XML parser. What you do need is an understanding of the behind-the-scenes stuff that can either help or quietly sabotage your hard work.
And I learned that lesson the hard way.
A few years back, I had a travel blog I loved. I was posting twice a week, doing my own photography, and I thought the writing was solid. For a while the traffic was inching along, slowly growing, and then one day it just stopped. Out of nowhere, I started losing rankings. I blamed it on competition, maybe some big travel sites pushing me out. But then one day I ran my site through a speed test and saw the problem: it took more than eight seconds to load on mobile. Eight seconds! No one was waiting that long.
That was my crash course in technical SEO.
Why the “technical” part matters
Think of it this way like your content is the story, but technical SEO is what makes sure people can actually get it. And if the delivery’s off, the story doesn’t land. A slow site, a clunky structure, or bad signals to search engines will keep your stuff from being seen.
Search engines don’t read like humans. They send out bots, little crawlers that go page by page, link by link, trying to figure out what’s there and whether it’s worth showing to people. If your blog is hard for them to navigate, you’re basically making them do extra work. And in search, the bots are lazy. They’d rather index someone else’s site that’s easier to read.
The same goes for people. Readers might like you, but if your page drags before loading or jumps around when they try to read, they’ll click away. People don’t even pause to think you are best or trustworthy, they just leave ASAP. Do it enough times and yeah, the search engines catch on.
My first fight with site speed
Site speed is the one thing I’ve seen tank more blogs than bad writing ever could. In my case, the problem was photos. I loved big, beautiful images. I’d upload them straight from my camera 5, 6, sometimes 8 megabytes each because they looked gorgeous on my laptop. On desktop it was fine, but load it on a phone with a shaky signal and yeah… it felt straight out of the dial-up days.
I first heard about image compression from a friend in a blogging group. I resisted at first, thinking smaller file sizes would mean ugly, pixelated pictures. But I tried it, and the difference was ridiculous. The photos looked the same, but the pages loaded in about two seconds instead of eight.
That was the first time I realized that technical SEO wasn’t about “hacking the algorithm.” It was about making the site pleasant to use.
Mobile, and how it quietly rules everything
I think the shift happened around 2018, maybe earlier, but now it’s official: mobile is the main thing. Most blogs I’ve worked on get 60–80% of their traffic from mobile. That means Google cares a lot more about how your site works on a phone than how it works on a desktop.
I had a client, a food blogger, whose site looked stunning on her MacBook. Big header image, sidebar with all her categories, pop-up signup forms but the working condition on a phone? Total disaster. Pictures all stretched, text so small you couldn’t read it, and the only way to get through the recipe was pinching and zooming the whole time.
Ended up switching her site over to a responsive theme, made the text bigger, and stripped out all the clutter that was getting in the way before the recipe showed up. Her mobile bounce rate dropped by half in a month. And her rankings improved, even though the desktop design lost a few “pretty” features she loved.
The “secure site” wake-up call
You’ve probably seen it before go to a site and the browser flashes a “Not Secure” warning at the top. Be honest, you see that warning and you’re gone, right? That warning pops up when the site isn’t running HTTPS, which basically means no SSL cert. For years, I didn’t bother. My blog wasn’t collecting credit card numbers, so why should I?
Then one day, Chrome started slapping “Not Secure” next to my URL. Even though nothing about my site had changed, it suddenly looked untrustworthy. And yes, my organic traffic dipped.
It took me ten minutes to fix. Most hosts give you a free SSL certificate it’s literally just clicking a button in your hosting dashboard and then updating WordPress settings. But until I did it, that tiny technical detail was quietly hurting me.
How Google finds your posts (and how you can help)
If there’s one part of technical SEO that trips bloggers up, it’s crawlability. People assume that if they publish a post, Google will find it. Usually it does eventually. But if your internal linking is weak, or your sitemap is missing or broken, some posts might not get discovered quickly, or at all.
I learned this after writing a massive, 4,000-word guide to Paris. It was the kind of post I thought would go viral. I published it, shared it on social media, and… nothing. Two months later, I realized it wasn’t even indexed. The reason? My sitemap hadn’t updated in weeks, and I’d never linked to the post from anywhere else on my site. Google didn’t even know it existed.
Now I make sure new posts are linked from at least one older, relevant post. And I resubmit my sitemap in Google Search Console anytime I make major changes.
The weird power of structured data
I avoided structured data for years because it sounded like coding. Schema markup, JSON-LD all terms that made my eyes glaze over. But I couldn’t ignore the results. Bloggers who used it were getting those fancy search result features star ratings, cooking times, product prices.
I finally gave in when I started doing product reviews. I added proper schema for reviews using my SEO plugin. Within weeks, my search listings started showing star ratings, which made them stand out and grab clicks.
The kicker? I didn’t write a single new post. My traffic increase came entirely from making existing posts look better in search results. That’s technical SEO at its quiet, unglamorous best.
Cleaning up the broken stuff
Over time, blogs become a mess. Old posts get deleted, external sites you link to vanish, images break. Those broken links aren’t just annoying for readers they waste crawl budget, meaning Google spends time on dead ends instead of your good stuff.
I had a blog with over 200 broken links when I finally checked. Some were from old guest posts where the author’s site had disappeared. And then there were the affiliate links but half of them went to products that weren’t even around anymore. Took me the better part of a weekend to clean them up and fixing what I could and redirecting the rest to something relevant.
Three weeks later, my rankings for certain posts started creeping up. Not because I’d added anything new, but because I’d removed the junk.
Keeping it healthy
Here’s the part a lot of bloggers don’t want to hear: technical SEO is never really finished. You don’t fix it once and walk away. Stuff changes all the time your theme updates, plugins get tweaked, hosting setups shift. And every one of those changes can quietly break something in the background without you noticing.
That’s why I make a habit of peeking at Google Search Console once a week. Doesn’t cost anything, and it’s the fastest way to catch weird errors before they pile up. I’ll usually run a speed test anytime I make a big change. Learned that the hard way sometimes one fat plugin is all it takes to drag the whole site down.
Kinda like brushing your teeth. Quick, easy, you barely think about it. Skip it for a while though, and suddenly you’ve got a bigger problem on your hands.
The big takeaway
If you’re blogging, think of technical SEO like plumbing. You don’t have to know how to install pipes, but you should be able to spot a leak and get it fixed before the whole place floods.
The basics matter fast site, works on a phone, secure, easy to move around. For people and for Google.
Get those right, and at least your posts have a shot at being seen. Ignore them, and you’re basically yelling into the void, even if your writing’s solid.
And yeah, I still screw things up. I still miss stuff. But now, when traffic suddenly dips, I don’t jump to “oh, the algorithm hates me.” First thing I do is check the technical side. Nine times out of ten, that’s where the problem and the fix ends up hiding.
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