So, let’s say you’re starting up a website or blog, or maybe you’re talking to someone who runs one. They’re telling you about how their blog is growing, and they drop some phrase like “Well, just the other day, my website’s page rank went from three to four.”
Naturally, you’re a bit confused at this. First, you’ve no idea what page rank is, and second…doesn’t a higher page rank mean that your page is -less- popular? It can seem a touch confusing, but don’t worry- it’s nowhere near as complicated as one might think at first.
See, PageRank is basically Google’s method for weighting the importance and popularity of websites and pages. It’s a sort of algorithm for determining the importance of a website: how often Google scans the site for changes, where it appears in the search results…you get the basic premise.
Strangely enough, PageRank doesn’t actually refer to a “page” in a website, but rather is named after Larry Page, Google’s CEO and the co-developer of the system. That doesn’t really have anything to do with understanding how PageRank works- it’s just a little snippet that I found rather interesting. 
How It Works
Via Smashingmagazine.com
Essentially, PageRank assigns each and every ‘page’ of a website a number from one to ten, with one being the least important, and ten being the most.
A lot of things go into determining the PageRank of a website. One of the more important deciding factor being the number of links which lead to the site. The more websites that link to the site in question, and the more referrals and visits the site in question gets, the higher the PageRank. Basically, it takes into account links leading to the site, compiling them into a sort of pseudo-voting system. Pages with higher PageRank also have their ‘votes’ rated higher up on the scale- if you’ve got a website like Engadget regularly linking to your weblog, you can expect a greater increase to your PageRank than if a bunch of little-known sites were linking to it.
An increase in PageRank can have a huge effect on your website’s traffic since it means you’ll move up in Google’s search results.
Viewing Your Website’s PageRank
Here you go. Note that it doesn’t assign a PageRank score to an entire website, but rather individual pages within a website. Usually, saying a website’s PageRank has increased simply means that its home page has gone up in rank.
Increasing Your PageRank
Honestly? There are a lot of websites and tutorials that purport to help you increase your PageRank, or get more people to visit your website. Ignore them. One of the best ways to get a higher PageRank is to have original, interesting content that people want to read, view, or link to. The more “back links” you get to your page, the higher up it moves in the PageRank pecking order.
Avoid link farms or spam websites- they’ll have little to no effect on your PageRank, and might actually end up increasing the flow of spam traffic to your website. Unless you fancy a bunch of spambots having a field day on your site, stay away.
A good way to increase PageRank is by registering your page with directories, but be sure to check the PageRank of those directories before doing so.
Via About.com
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