Google SEO 2023: How to Rank on Google First Page in 2023

Let's talk about how to find the approach to SEO that fits your businesses needs. How do search engines rank your content? The key to getting your content to rank well in search is having a clear understanding of how Google finds, analyzes, and ranks your content.

How does content rank in search?

Getting your content to rank highly in search results depends predominantly on two things.

1. Improving discovery and relevance by creating lots of high quality content on the topics you want to be known .
2. Building authority by getting lots of high quality backlinks to your website.

Discovery, relevance, and authority those are the three stages that cover how search engines work in a nutshell, and each of these three stages correlates with an action the search engine takes crawling, indexing, and ranking.

•  Discovery stage 

Search engine bots discover your web page by crawling it. Which really just means it discovers your web page and takes note of all the content within it.

•  Relevant stage 

Once a search engine in Bot discovers your content, it decides how relevant it is to certain search queries by indexing it (based on signals like keywords) within the content.

•  Authority stage 

This means building enough credibility through backlinks and other factors that search engines consider your site authoritative enough to rank high in the search results.  Authority directly impacts ranking strength. 

How Search Engines Rank Content is Using The Library Metaphor

I find the best way to explain how search engines rank content is using the library metaphor. After all, Google is just a giant library.

Let's pretend for a moment you work in a library. You have a ton of books in a pile in front of you, and you need to figure out where in the library these books need to be stored.

How Google Finds, Analyzes, and Ranks Content?

This is a great way to think about how Google finds, analyzes, and ranks content.

•  Crawling/discovery (find the book) 

Your first step is to find all of these books. This is crawling. If a book isn't in the stack to begin with, or you can't see it, you won't be able to put it on a shelf. That's the discovery stage in the sense of a website. Do you have a piece of content and can the search engines access it?

•  Indexing/Relevance (categorize the books) 

The second step is to categorize the books this is indexing the books in your library cover all sorts of topics, fiction, nonfiction, science history, and technology.

 How do you sort them? 

This is where you assess the relevance of a book to a topic by looking at the title, flipping through some pages, seeing who the author is and whether they're known for writing around certain topics.

Search Engine bots index content on a website in a similar way. They crawl the content and say what are the contents of this web page? What do they mean when they bucket them into some sort of topic and start to create some semantic associations between.

•  Ranking/Authority (decide which books to feature) 

Your third step is figuring out which books to feature. What should be on your best seller shelf? Which book should you make easier to find than others? This is ranking.

The way you determine which books are most easily discoverable for visitors to your library is mostly based on whether the book comes from credible sources.

How Do You Determine Website Authority?

This is subjective exercise. In the case of books, you could look for credible authors like Dan Brown and HG Wells. Those are authoritative sources. We know that because they're talked about a lot, referred to a lot, they're cited in other works. Getting cited is like having backlinks to your website. Things that are mentioned in the press and are linked to from other sites regularly. That's what builds authority.

 These three stages and actions are dependent on one another. 

• If your content isn't relevant, then it has little chance of ranking, no matter how authoritative it is.
• If your website isn't authoritative, then it has little chance of ranking, no matter how relevant it is.

Finally, if your website can't be discovered in the first place, it has no chance of ranking at all.