Blogger SEO tips: the five habits that move a blog, and the Blogger settings to fix once

The SEO work that moves a blog is a short list, and it is not the list most blogging advice gives you. In order of effect: publish one post per real question instead of several posts around a theme, link every new post from the three or four older posts that already earn impressions, update your best performing posts rather than adding more, make the author and the experience behind the post visible, and keep the archive clean so a crawler can reach every post in two clicks from the home page. Everything else, including the plugin settings people argue about, sits below those five. This page works through each one, then covers the settings that are specific to the Blogger platform.

One post, one question

A blog with forty posts that each answer a distinct question beats a blog with a hundred and forty posts that circle eight themes. The reason is simple: when three of your posts answer the same question, a search engine has to pick one, and the other two take internal links, attention and crawl budget away from the one it picked.

Before you write, search the question and read your own site's results. If you already have a post on it, update that post. Open Search Console, filter queries to your domain, and look for questions where you appear on the second page: those already have demand and partial relevance, and a rewrite of the existing post wins faster than a new post ever does.

Name the post after the question. A title that reads "How long does sourdough starter take to activate" earns more clicks and gets quoted more often than "Sourdough diaries, part four", and Google's own guidance on title links asks for exactly that kind of descriptive text.

Link the archive into the new post

This is the highest return half hour in blogging and almost nobody spends it. Every time you publish, go back into three or four older posts and add a link to the new one from inside the body text, with anchor text that describes what the reader will get. Then link out from the new post to the two older posts a reader would want next.

Posts that no older post links to are reachable only from the archive feed, which slides them down the page and out of reach as you publish more. On most blogs the posts that never rank are exactly the posts nothing links to. Fixing that is free and takes minutes.

Update, do not accumulate

Set a quarterly habit. Pull your twenty highest impression posts, open each one, and do four things: correct anything now out of date, add the sections readers ask about in comments and emails, tighten the opening so the answer is in the first two sentences, and refresh the internal links. A post improved this way usually climbs within weeks, because the demand and the authority are already attached to the URL.

Posts that earn nothing after a year and answer nothing specific are different work. Merge each one into the strongest related post, then redirect its URL to that post. You lose nothing and the surviving post gets stronger.

Make the person behind the blog visible

Blogs win on first hand experience, and search engines look for the signals of it. Put a real author name on every post, with a short line about why that person knows the subject. Give the blog an about page with a photograph, a location, and a way to contact you. Show the work: your own photographs rather than stock images, your own numbers, the thing you tried that did not go to plan and what you changed.

Add Article structured data with an author, a date published and a date modified, and keep the dates honest. Google's Article documentation lists the properties, and a date you change without changing the content undermines the signal you are trying to send.

Keep the archive crawlable

• Every post reachable in two clicks from the home page, through category or label pages that are themselves linked from the navigation.
• A sitemap submitted in Search Console, following Google's sitemap guidance.
• One canonical URL per post. Tag archives, print views and feed copies all point back to the post, which is what Google's note on consolidating duplicate URLs is for.
• Pagination that works without JavaScript, so archive pages pass link value down to older posts.
• Images compressed and sized, because a blog's weight is almost always its images.
• Thin tag pages removed rather than left to compete. A tag with two posts behind it is not a page worth having.

If your blog is on Blogger

Blogger handles several things for you and leaves a few in your hands. Work through these once in the dashboard, and the Blogger Help Centre carries the current click paths.

• Use a custom domain. Your own domain is an asset you keep. A subdomain on a hosting platform is not.
• Fill in the search description for the blog and for each individual post. Blogger leaves post descriptions empty by default, and an empty one hands the snippet choice away.
• Labels are not categories. Use a small number of labels that match how readers think, and link the label pages from your navigation so they work as hub pages.
• Check your theme on a phone first. Pick a responsive theme and remove the widgets you do not use, since every widget adds weight to every page.
• Turn on HTTPS redirect so there is one secure version of every URL.
• Verify the blog in Search Console and submit the sitemap, so you can see the queries you already appear for.

This page covers the ongoing SEO habits of running a blog. For the step by step workflow of writing a single post, from picking the query to the structure that earns the position, see the SEO blog post workflow. For choosing which questions to write about, see keyword research in five steps. For what happens between publishing and ranking, see how search engines work.

Asked and answered: Blogger SEO tips

How often should a blog publish for SEO?

Often enough to keep a habit, and never at the cost of answering a real question. One strong post a fortnight with internal links added each time outperforms three thin posts a week.

Do I need a plugin or an SEO tool to do this?

No. Search Console gives you the query data, and the five habits above are editorial decisions. A tool makes the reporting faster once the habits are in place.

How long is long enough for a blog post?

As long as the question needs. Write the complete answer, then cut every sentence that exists to pad the count. A tight nine hundred words that fully settles a question beats two thousand that circle it.

Should I delete old posts that get no traffic?

Merge them into a stronger post and redirect the URL. Deleting without a redirect throws away whatever links and history the URL had.

Is a free blogging platform a problem for SEO?

Point your own domain at it and the platform choice stops mattering for ranking. What matters is one URL per post, a crawlable archive, and a theme that is quick on a phone.

What is the first thing to fix on an existing blog?

Internal links. Find the posts nothing links to, link them from your strongest related posts, and watch the impressions on those URLs over the following month.

Posts written for a reader who never visits

Your post titles, headings and short answers now serve two readers. A search crawler decides where the post ranks. An assistant lifts a fact or a sentence from it into a reply for someone who asked your question in a chat window, and that person may never see Blogger at all.

So write the first paragraph of each post as a complete answer, with the date and the name of the place or product it concerns. Then ask the same question in ChatGPT or Gemini and see whether your blog is a source. AI Knows Us lists the sources behind the answers assistants give about a business.