If you are a website owner or a blogger, ask yourself why you exert the efforts needed to maintain a website.  Now check reasons one to five and chances are, wanting to make money out of the website is one of the reasons.  Now ask yourself how you can make money out of your website and if you are familiar of how search engine optimization works, PageRank will be one of your top answers.

PageRank is a trademark of Google.  Google defines PageRank as:

“PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important”.”

It’s ok if you don’t understand that definition.  Simply put, Google puts a ranking on your website’s importance as determined by the world wide web.  It is a simple voting system with other websites as the voters.  If a website links to your website, you receive a vote.  It’s called an inbound link.  Although outbound links or links that goes out of your website also has a little weight on your site’s rank.  If the website casting the vote is important and relevant in the eyes of Google, then that vote will be of a heavier value.  This process is developed by Google co-founder Larry Page basing on his drive to develop a search engine that “understands exactly what you mean and gives you back exactly what you want.”

PageRank will rank your website from one to ten.  They rank the website using more than 500 million variables and 2 billion terms.  So what will happen if your website has a high PageRank ranking?  Google will realize that your website is important so the next time someone searches in Google using keywords that you have, you’ll probably be among the top choices.  As a website owner, that’s what you want.  You don’t want to be buried in obscurity just because you have a low rank so you have to work on it.

But when I say work on it, work on it legitimately.  There are a lot of companies who tries to manipulate the rankings using several techniques.  PageRank manipulation is frowned upon.  There are some who even try to sell high valued PageRank to other webmasters.  A more common strategy is by using a link farm.  PageRank manipulation can benefit your site but once Google discovers what you are doing, your page’s ranking is done.  So it would be to your best interest to work on your PageRank ranking legitimately.

It’s a no-brainer that with high rankings, your site will gain more exposure.  More exposure means more customers coming in and in the long run, more sales.