Search is the gateway to almost everything we do on the web.
For example, if we want to find and research solution providers to a technological need chances are we'll start by entering some keywords into Google.
Today people search on a variety of devices including mobiles, tablets, laptops and desktops.
Fundamentally, within Google when someone enters text then Google is wanting to provide the most useful results it can to the user. It does this by reviewing content it knows about using a proprietary algorithm (which takes into account relevance and authority) and then it delivers its results ranked with those it belives to be most useful at the top.
By understanding the process we can work with search engines to improve our visibility and gain more visitors to our websites.
With research we can determine which keywords to focus upon and then come up with and optimise content for the keywords. This will help us to improve our relevance for keywords and phrases that we determine are important to our business.
Search engines also know quite a bit about semantic and thematic relationships.
Links from other sites and social exposure are important as they help to give our website credibility and authority.
A link may be viewed in terms of a vote of confidence or trust by another site. That said we also need to take into account the quality of the site from where the link is located. The better the quality the more benefit it will have.
We can also consider local and mobile implications.
In order to know how we're doing we need to measure results in order that we know what we're getting in return for our investment.