How Google finds, crawls, and ranks your website — and the mental model that changes everything.
You've probably heard that SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. But here's what most people miss: SEO is not about tricking Google — it's about helping Google understand your website.
When you understand exactly how Google works — how it finds pages, decides what they're about, and chooses what to show in search results — everything else falls into place. Day 1 is about building that mental model.
🎯 By the end of Day 1: You'll understand how Google crawls, indexes, and ranks websites — and you'll have set up the two free tools every serious SEO needs.
How Google Search Works (Google Official) · 5 min
Google's entire system has three stages. Once you understand these, you'll know exactly what to fix on any website.
Google uses software called "crawlers" (also called "spiders" or "Googlebot") to discover pages on the internet. Crawlers follow links from page to page, like following a trail of breadcrumbs. If a page has no links pointing to it, Google may never find it.
What this means for you: Every page on your site should be reachable through links. Orphan pages (pages with no links) often don't get indexed.
After crawling a page, Google reads and analyzes it — looking at the text, images, videos, and code. It then decides whether to store it in its massive database called the "index." Not every page gets indexed; Google skips duplicate, thin, or low-quality content.
What this means for you: Your pages need to be clear, valuable, and technically accessible. A page that isn't indexed can't rank — no matter how good it is.
When someone searches on Google, it looks through its index and returns the most relevant, trustworthy results. Google uses hundreds of signals to decide the order — including the quality of your content, how many other sites link to you, how fast your site loads, and how well your page matches the searcher's intent.
What this means for you: Rankings are earned, not bought (unless you're doing paid ads). The next 6 days teach you exactly which signals matter most.
💡 Key takeaway: The SEO process maps perfectly to these 3 stages. Technical SEO (Day 4) ensures Google can crawl and index your site. Keyword research (Day 2) and on-page SEO (Day 3) help Google understand what your pages are about. Content (Day 5) and backlinks (Day 6) are the ranking signals that push you up.
Google has a concept called E-E-A-T: Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. This framework guides how Google evaluates content quality.
You don't need to be famous to rank well. But you do need to demonstrate that your content comes from real experience and genuine expertise.
SERP stands for Search Engine Results Page — it's the page Google shows after you search. A modern SERP contains much more than 10 blue links. You'll see featured snippets, knowledge panels, local packs, image carousels, video results, and more. Learning which SERP features appear for your target keywords is an important part of keyword strategy (Day 2).
Before you do anything else in SEO, set these up:
Copy these prompts and paste them into ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini (all free). Replace the text in [brackets] with your own details.
Your mission for Day 1 is to verify your website in Google Search Console. This takes about 10 minutes and gives you access to data that most website owners never see.
Most people who fail at SEO make the same handful of mistakes in their first few weeks. Knowing them now saves you months of wasted effort.
New sites have no authority. Competing for "best running shoes" against Nike and REI will get you nowhere. Start with long-tail, low-competition keywords and build from there.
If someone searches "how to tie a tie," they want a tutorial, not a product page. Publishing the wrong type of content for a keyword is one of the most common reasons pages don't rank, even when fully optimized.
New pages typically take 3 to 6 months to rank, sometimes longer on competitive topics. Most beginners give up before Google has had time to properly evaluate their content. Consistency over 6 months beats intensity over 6 weeks.
"Buy cheap shoes. Our cheap shoes are the cheapest shoes." Google's algorithms have been trained to detect keyword stuffing and it actively hurts rankings. Write for humans first; Google will follow.
Flying blind without data is one of the biggest beginner mistakes. GSC is free and shows you exactly how Google sees your site. You can't fix what you can't measure. Set it up today (it's your Day 1 task).
The fastest way to understand what good SEO looks like is to see the difference side by side. These are real patterns seen across thousands of beginner sites.
💡 The pattern: In every "after" example, the change is the same - be specific, be descriptive, and make it obvious what the page is about. Google rewards clarity.
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