what the heck is PageRank?

PageRank? Why care about PageRank? Well, think about this: Google provides listing results based off of combining overall importance and query-specific relevance, and by comparing these two factors they are able to put the most relevant and reliable results first. PageRank is a scale used by Google to reflect their view of a sites importance, and the higher your PageRank the more likely it is to appear at the top of the search results.

SO the big question now is what goes into your site's PageRank? When determining your PageRank Google considers over 500 million variables and 2 billion terms in order to rate sites on their zero to ten scale, but one of the primary factors, and definitely one of the easiest to define, is how many votes your site has. Google interprets a link from one page to another as a vote for the 2nd site. Votes are looked at in sheer volume, but that isn't the most important factor. When looking at your votes PageRank also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are considered to be important weigh more heavily and this gives the linked page greater value.

It is known that other factors, ie the relevance of keyword phrases on the page and traffic to the page also influence the PageRank. This means developing more inbound links is not all you need to do to raise your PageRank, you still need to use other proper SEO and SEM techniques.

So what have we learned? The PageRank of a particular page is roughly based upon, your sites visitors, SEO, and the quantity of inbound links as well as the quality of the pages providing the links.