In April 2020, locked down and bored, I published my first blog post. It was called "How can flipping a coin be such a handy decision maker." It opened with a Walter White quote, used the University of Tokyo as a hypothetical, and ended - I'm not making this up - with "I'm a noob to the whole blog game, excuse me for all the unintentional mistakes."

I had no idea what I was doing. No keyword research, no plan, no audience. Seven followers. But a few weeks later I searched a phrase from the post out of curiosity, and there it was on Google. My little ramble had been indexed. That tiny dopamine hit is the reason I do SEO today - so let me unpack what actually happened, because it's the same thing happening on every page you publish.

First, what "indexing" even means

People throw "indexing" and "ranking" around like they're the same thing. They're not. There are three separate stages, and a page can fail at any one of them.

How a page gets found

Crawl → Index → Rank

Crawl

Googlebot discovers the URL by following links and sitemaps. If nothing points to your page, it may never be seen.

Index

Google reads the page, understands the topic, and stores it. Only indexed pages can ever appear in results.

Rank

When someone searches, Google orders indexed pages by relevance and quality. This is the part everyone obsesses over.

My coin-flip post got crawled because Medium is a huge, heavily-linked domain - Google's crawler was always going to find it. It got indexed because the writing, however naive, was clearly about something. And it "ranked," loosely, for a phrase so specific that almost nobody else had written it. That last part is the whole lesson.

You don't beat the internet by competing for the biggest words. You win by owning the exact phrase someone actually types.

Why a weirdly specific title worked

If I'd titled that post "Decision Making" I would have been buried under a billion pages forever. Instead I'd written a long, oddly specific sentence - and that specificity was accidental SEO gold. Here's the anatomy of why.

Anatomy of the title that ranked

"How can flipping a coin be such a handy decision maker"

  • It's a real question. It matches how people actually search - in full phrases, not single words.
  • It's long-tail. Low search volume, but almost zero competition - so a nobody could rank.
  • It states the topic plainly. "Coin," "decision" - Google knew exactly what the page was about.
  • It's distinctive. Nobody else phrases it that way, so there was nothing to crowd it out.

Head terms vs. the long tail

This is the single mental model I wish I'd had at 18. Big, generic keywords have huge volume and brutal competition. Specific, longer phrases have less volume but you can actually win them - and they convert better, because the searcher knows exactly what they want.

Volume vs. your odds of winning

Why specific beats broad

"decisions" - search volumeHuge
"decisions" - your chance to rankTiny
"flip a coin to make a decision" - volumeModest
"flip a coin to make a decision" - chanceReal

Six years on, this is still the core of how I plan content for clients. Find the phrases real people use, check that you can realistically compete, and write the genuinely best page for that exact intent. The 18-year-old version of me did this by luck. Now I do it on purpose.

The journey, briefly

From accident to method

How the lesson compounded

2020

The accidental win

First-year college, first post, no strategy - and it got indexed and found. The curiosity stuck.

2021–22

Reverse-engineering it

I started asking why it worked: crawling, indexing, intent, competition. The vocabulary clicked.

2023–24

Doing it on purpose

Keyword research, on-page structure, internal links, and search intent became part of real campaigns.

Now

It's a system

Every page I publish - including this one - is built crawl-first, intent-first, and titled to be found.

The takeaway in one line

Your first content doesn't have to be good. It has to be findable. Get something specific, clear, and indexable out the door - then learn from what the data tells you.

What I'd tell anyone starting today

  • Write for one specific phrase a real person would type, not a vague topic.
  • Make sure the page can be crawled - link to it, add it to your sitemap.
  • Put the topic plainly in the title. Clever-but-vague loses to clear-and-specific.
  • Publish before it's perfect. The data only starts once it's live.

That coin-flip post is still up. It's clumsy and I love it, because it's proof that the internet rewards specificity and consistency over polish. Flip the coin. Hit publish.