Whta is Pagerank?  How Google Chooses Who To Put 1st ?

As a business owner you need to learn exactly what it takes to get Google to list your site ahead of your competitors for the search terms relevant to your business.

You can't possibly concern yourself with the hundreds of factors Google takes into account when looking at a web page. What you can do is focus on the most important elements which have the biggest impact on your site rankings.

There are the on-page factors you need to think about, such as the content of the page, the title, and making sure you are targeting your page to the right keywords you want to rank for (see other articles in this series for more on this).

Beyond the basics, you need to learn about how Google invented "PageRank" to decide which sites should rank higher in search results than others.

PAGERANK

Instead of just deciding which websites are best based on their own calculations, Google tries to work out which websites WE think are best, and puts them first in search results.You want your site near the top.

PageRank is Google's attempt to measure the value of a webpage by comparing it to every other page online. PageRank doesn't have anything to do with the content or structure of a webpage, but just how it compares to all others. A webpage can have a PageRank of 0 through 10, with a new webpage being assigned a 0. The most popular sites on the web, like Google and Facebook and Wikipedia, are the kinds of sites that achieve a PageRank of 10.

Pagerank measures the importance of any single page by analysing the quality and quantity of other sites online linking to it.

The Key Idea:

Google has worked out that the more important a website is, the more links there will be online pointing to it. Counting links is a measure of quality because nobody is linking to the junk online, but everyone is linking to the pages worth seeing.

It is all a measure of links, across the entire web. By analysing the links online that we have all published on our own websites, Google has essentially turned the entire world wide web into a voting system, with every link counting as a vote of quality and confidence for other pages. At it's most basic; if I publish a link from my site to yours, your site benefits.

So when you want your website to bubble up to the top of the endless list of search results, and you've already handled the on-page factors, you need to shift your focus to gaining backlinks.

There is another article in this series about backlinks, and I highly recommend you read it.