A Minimal SEO Checklist for Technical Blog Posts

Technical blog SEO is simpler than the SEO industry wants you to believe. Most of the checklist fits on one screen. Everything else is noise.

The checklist

• One H1 that matches the page's <title> and the og:title. They should be the same idea, not the same string.
• One URL that does not change. A canonical tag pointing at it, in case any system rewrites it.
• One meta description under 160 characters, with the primary keyword near the front.
• One image with descriptive alt text, only if it adds to the page.
• One sitemap entry with a real lastmod.

What is not on the checklist

• Keyword density. Models and crawlers do not care; you should not either.
• Schema.org markup. Useful for some sites, noise for most.
• Open Graph tags beyond the basic six. Twitter is happy with the basics.

The single thing that matters most

A title that matches the question a human would type. If the title is "How to do X with Y," and the body actually answers that, the SEO is done. The rest is hygiene.