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What Is Google PageRank And Why Does It Matter?

Description: We've all heard about page ranking, but gaining a better understanding of what it actually means is a great way to move towards increasing your own Page Rank.

The process of ranking websites is a never ending one as far as the search engines are concerned. The biggest search engine of all, Google, uses its PageRank system to decide which web pages show up in the top spots whenever you search for a specific keyword or phrase online.

Google PageRank is built on a complicated algorithm that is responsible for ranking web pages according to a number of different factors. In its basic sense, the most popular web pages will be ranked higher than less popular ones, but it's the process of deciding what makes a web page popular that decides where each individual one is placed in the search results.

That is why PageRank is so important, and it's also why webmasters are constantly tweaking their websites and using all manner of white hat search engine optimization techniques to try and increase the popularity of their web pages.

Some webmasters think of their website as being a whole entity and in some ways it is, but it's also important to think of each page as a separate entity as well, because each one has the potential to appear in the search results for a particular term or phrase.

While the algorithms that help Google decide where each page should be ranked are hard to understand in themselves, there are two basic points to remember when it comes to understanding how the process works.

Firstly the more links you have coming into each page of your website, the more popular that page is deemed to be. But there is a qualifying part to that broad statement - those incoming links need to be of good quality, which is why link farms and similar websites should be avoided at all costs. Concentrate on trying to get links from websites that are related to yours, and try and get links from the best ones available. You can check their PageRank by using any of the free tools available online.

The second part of how PageRank is determined relates to the content of the page Google is looking at. If two web pages on the same subject have exactly the same amount of good quality links coming into them, the higher ranked page will be the one that is deemed to have the most appropriate content. This is where your use of keywords and phrases will come in extremely handy.

In short there's a lot more that goes into PageRank than meets the eye. The more you understand how this process works, the more likely it is that you will be able to legally improve the PageRank of each individual page on your website as a result.