How can you work out how important Google considers your website to be? Google assigns each page in its index a PageRank value. A high PageRank is advantageous to getting a good listing in Google search results but not the only factor - there are many sites with a PageRank of 2,3 or 4 with listings in the top ten on a particular search term, and sites with PageRanks of 6,7 or 8 that cannot be found in search results except on exact searches of the business' name. A large determinant of a high PageRank value is the number of quality and relevant websites that link to it. The upshot: Build quality links to improve your PageRank.

Google's PageRank algorithm works from a simple basis: each link on the Internet can be considered a "vote" for another website. PageRank is therefore a measure of importance of a page in Google's eyes, everything is relative - the relevance of your website's pages to search terms (and therefore PageRank) can be influenced by the actions of others and how many pages are indexed by Google. That makes it really important to be continually striving to improve and grow links to your website.

How do you view PageRank values?

There are many websites that query Google's DataCentres to give you an approximation of your current PageRank, but the actual PageRank of any given page is held in secret by Google. Approximately every three months the current PageRank values are exported to Google's Toolbar which you can use to get an idea of a web page's PageRank value. These are not the actual PageRank values for a given page - they are approximations as at the last time Google exported its live data. The toolbar is available from Google's website.

What do PageRank values in the toolbar mean?

The PageRank values in the Google toolbar range in value from 0 to 10. The number shown is rounded and each number is considered ten times more significant than the number before. This means it is ten times more difficult to move a webpage or website from PageRank 4 to PageRank 5 than to move from PageRank 3 to PageRank 4. The PageRank of your home page is almost always your whole website's PageRank and the page with the highest PageRank in your site.

How do you increase PageRank values?

How you structure your internal links can influence the PageRank of an individual page within your site as well as whether links from other sites come directly to that page, and whether your page links to other websites.

By continuously striving to increase the number of quality links to your site you can help counter the effect of new pages being added to the Internet that potentially reduce the PageRank of pages in your site. Some strategies you can use are:

• Link Exchanges
• Listing in Directories
• Publish Articles and other content in forums, blogs and websites relating to your business - with links back to your site
• Encourage high ranking pages to link to you. The PageRank of the page that links to you is a measure of the voting power of that page, and can influence how important Google sees your page.
• Monitor the number of outward links on your pages. The more pages you link to the more the potential dilution of your PageRank values for that page.
• Look for link partners on different servers - as this shows Google that the sites that link to you are from different businesses, not different sites run from the same business. Google determines this by looking at the third value in your IP address (called the 'Class C' portion). If the first part of the address and the class C block are the same, Google may conclude that this site comes from the same server and therefore not assign that site as much voting power towards other sites on the same server.