What Does It Mean to Rank High on Google?

The Google PageRank is in effect, a popularity score and it affects everyone who has their own website. It is a major contributor to good SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and many people don’t know what it is. Optimization is ever evolving and with new websites always being added to Google PageRank, based on how important they are. Websites are ranked on a scale of 0-10 and are based on many things such as keywords and traffic, but it is mainly based on how many other sites have links to yours.

PageRank was founded by Larry Page, a Google cofounder and each PageRank score is based on a page not a whole website – meaning your website will have many separate PageRank scores.

Why Do People Care About the PageRank?

PageRank is used to place your website in a rank through enhancing the organic search by having a link leading to your website posted on a high ranked website on Google PageRank. If you have a link on a high ranked website such as Yahoo.com, it will affect your PageRank rate, thus increasing the significance of your site. When one site links to another, they are, in basic terms, voting for that page. The more votes your site gets, the more important it is deemed to be.

Finding Your Google PageRank

You can find the PageRank of all sites on the Google toolbar. It is a plugin that can be downloaded for free via Firefox or Internet Explorer. The icon for the PageRank is a horizontal green thermostat; simply go to any website and move your mouse over the icon and it will show the site’s PageRank. In some cases, there may not be a PageRank. This could be because there is no information available or even worse, Google may not know of this site, probably due to poor search engine optimization on that website – this is known as ‘Google Indexing.’

What Each Score Means

The PageRank scale ranges from 0-10, with zero being the lowest and ten being the highest PageRank score possible. However, it is almost impossible to achieve a score of eight, nine or ten. MSNBC and ESPN.com have a PageRank score of 8, Twitter and Yahoo a score of 9, and Facebook and Google have a score of 10. It is said that the score system is based on a base-10 logarithmic – the same scale that is used to measure an earthquake’s seismic energy. Here is a basic list of the scores, what they stand for and some examples of sites with the higher ranking.

PR10 – Best of the Best; Google.com
PR9 – Hard to achieve; Yahoo.com
PR8 – many sites strive for PR7, still quite difficult to achieve; MSNBC.com
PR7 – Thought to be a top site, hard work with SEO as key
PR6 – Good place to be to compete with higher rankings
PR5 – Could result in first page placing in search engines
PR4 – A little above average – more SEO and better web designs could improve score
PR3 – Average – majority of sites have this PageRank score
PR2 – Slightly below average, consider more SEO and internet marketing
PR1 – Site is indexed, could be a little better
PR0 – unfortunately Google does not know this site

How to Improve Your Rank

Boosting the search engine optimization placing of your site is the key factor in improving your rank. One way to do this is to have a link to your site on a very high ranked site. A great starting place to do this is Biznik.com, which has a PageRank score of 6. One of the other important ways to improve your PageRank is to generate a lot of traffic to your site. The more traffic you have, the higher you will rank and it is all owed to good SEO and linking.

Published by Axiom Internet Marketing.