Good writing gets a post read once it's found. Technical SEO is what gets it found at all. Most of it is mechanical — a handful of fields and files that either exist correctly or don't — which makes it easy to skip and easy to fix once you know what to check.
This is the checklist to run through before publishing, and periodically after. If you're still working on the writing itself, start with how to write technical blog posts — come back here once the draft is done.
Per-post basics
Every post needs these fields set correctly, not left as defaults:
Title tag. Specific and front-loaded with the keyword someone would actually search — not clever, not vague. "Debugging a Postgres Deadlock in Production" over "A Database Mystery."
Meta description. One or two sentences, roughly 150–160 characters, stating the actual outcome of the post. This is what shows up under the title in search results and heavily influences whether someone clicks.
A single H1. The page title, rendered once. Don't repeat it as a heading inside the body — start the body with an intro paragraph or a real section heading instead.
A clean URL slug. Lowercase, hyphenated, matching the topic — technical-seo-checklist, not post-47 or a slug that no longer matches the title after an edit.
Descriptive heading hierarchy. H2s for main sections, H3s for subsections, in order, without skipping levels. Search engines use this structure to understand what the page covers, and it's what generates jump-to-section links in results.
Findability: sitemap, RSS, and crawling
Search engines and readers both need a way to discover a post beyond stumbling onto your homepage.
Sitemap. An XML file listing every page on your site, so search engines can find and re-crawl posts without following every internal link by hand. Full setup in the sitemap guide — most platforms, including Blogizi, generate and update this automatically.
RSS feed. Lets readers and aggregators subscribe without a login or a scraper. Increasingly this also feeds newsletter tools and other syndication — see the RSS feed guide.
robots.txt. Make sure it isn't accidentally blocking crawlers from your blog section — a surprisingly common mistake after a site migration or a hasty staging-environment config that never got reverted.
Submit to Search Console. Verify your domain in Google Search Console and submit your sitemap directly rather than waiting for organic discovery. New posts typically get crawled within hours this way instead of days.
Social and sharing
Open Graph image. Without one, links shared on Slack, X, or LinkedIn show a blank or generic card, which measurably hurts click-through even when the headline is good. See how to add OG images — this can be automated per-post rather than designed by hand each time.
Open Graph title and description. Usually mirror your title and meta description, but can be written separately if the ideal phrasing for a search snippet differs from the ideal phrasing for a social share.
Twitter/X card tags. Most platforms fall back to Open Graph tags automatically; worth a quick check that a shared link actually renders a preview card rather than a bare link.
Structural and technical health
Canonical tags. If the same content is ever reachable at more than one URL (a common side effect of tag pages, pagination, or syndication), a canonical tag tells search engines which one is the source of truth, preventing them from splitting ranking signal across duplicates.
Internal links. Every post should link to at least one or two related posts, and pillar pages should link out to their supporting posts. This is what turns a pile of individual articles into a topic cluster search engines can recognize as an authority.
Alt text on images. Every image needs a short, accurate description — it helps accessibility and gives search engines context they can't infer from pixels.
Page speed. Compressed images, minimal render-blocking scripts, and fast server response times. This mostly comes down to hosting choice — see best developer blogging platforms for how different options handle this by default.
Mobile rendering. Check that code blocks don't overflow, images scale, and text stays readable on a phone screen — a large share of search traffic arrives on mobile.
The habit that matters more than any single item
None of this needs to be rebuilt per post. The right target is a platform or setup where sitemap, RSS, OG images, and canonical tags are handled once, automatically, for every post you publish — so the only thing left to check per post is the title, description, and internal links. That's the difference between technical SEO being a fifteen-minute pass and a thirty-item manual chore every time you publish.
For the full picture on how developer blogging fits together end to end, see the developer blogging guide.