Itsuking Blog
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Things I made, learned, and thought about

An SEO Beginner Adds Search Console and Structured Data to a Personal Blog

4 min read745 words

I added SEO to this blog while knowing almost nothing about SEO. I registered the site with Google Search Console and added structured data (JSON-LD) and breadcrumbs to the post pages. This post records what I did and what I learned, so I can look back on it later.

Why I started

If I'm going to start a blog and keep writing posts, I want people to read them. I also wanted to see my blog show up near the top of search results at least once.

The problem was that I knew nothing about SEO. I learned the word "breadcrumbs" for the first time this time. So I first read some articles about SEO, and then used them to decide what to do for this blog.

Articles I read

I read these two articles (both in Japanese).

Both are written for companies running their own websites, and they also cover keyword strategy, editorial review, and settings for product pages. Not all of it applies to a personal blog, so I picked only what fits this one.

What was already there

When I looked into it, the basics were already in place from when I built the blog: the sitemap, robots.txt, a description for each post (meta description), OGP, and links between the Japanese and English versions of each page (hreflang).

So this time, I added things beyond those.

What I added

Structured data (JSON-LD)

JSON-LD is data that describes a page's content in a form search engines can read easily. It is embedded in the HTML, but it does not appear on the reader's screen.

When people read a post, they can see the title, the author, and the publication date right away. JSON-LD is a way to make sure search engines get that information too. On this blog, I added post information (BlogPosting) to the post pages, and the blog name and author information to the top page. The values come from the post data in microCMS automatically, so I don't have to enter them by hand each time I write a post.

Breadcrumbs

Breadcrumbs show where a page sits on the site, like "Itsuking Blog › Life › Post title".

At first I added them only as JSON-LD data, but then I decided to show them on the page too. They appear in small text above the post title. The on-screen breadcrumbs and the JSON-LD are built from the same data, so the two never get out of sync.

When I checked a live post with Google's Rich Results Test, both "Article" and "Breadcrumbs" were detected as valid.

Registering with Search Console

Search Console is a free tool for checking how your blog appears in Google Search. It shows which search terms your pages appeared for and how many times they were clicked.

I didn't get a custom domain and registered the current workers.dev address as is. To be honest, I didn't want to spend much money on this blog. Even if I paid for a domain, I could easily imagine, knowing how lazy I am, that the posts themselves wouldn't grow much.

To verify ownership, I used the method of adding a given tag to the page's head. After registering, I also submitted the sitemap.

Other changes

  • Added each post's last updated date to the sitemap, so that search engines learn about updates when I edit a post
  • Set the site search results page not to appear in search results (noindex)
  • Added a description (alt text) to the diagram in my previous post, "The Tech Behind This Blog"
  • Made a checklist of things to check when writing a post, such as whether the title alone tells what the post is about and whether the first paragraph sums up the post

What I learned

I learned that getting found by search engines is not only about what's in the posts. There is also room for work behind the page. JSON-LD tells search engines what a page is about with data readers can't see, and breadcrumbs tell them where the page sits on the site.

On the other hand, there is a limit to what the site itself can do. That's also why I made the checklist: from here on, it depends on how I write the posts.

What's next

Right after I submitted the sitemap, Search Console showed the status "Couldn't fetch." I'll check again in a few days to see whether it has been read correctly.

Impressions and clicks in search should also start showing up in Search Console after a while. I plan to write about the results in a follow-up post, as a look at how well this worked.