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Every website is ‘ranked’ by Google. Brand new websites start off with a PR 0 (PageRank zero), while the ranking scale goes up to a PR 10. For most websites, with a little bit of work, you’ll be able to hit a PR 3 without too much trouble, while moving up from there tends to require a lot of work.

There are a few ways to find out what your PageRank is:

Visit the website www.whatsmypagerank.com. Enter in your website address and this site will tell you what your page is currently ranked at in Google.

Following are a few FAQ’s off the What’s My Page Rank website:

Q: What Is a PageRank?
A: PageRank is a numerical value which represents the popularity of a website. This is status given to websites by www.google.com

Q: What is the highest Page Rank you can get?
A: PageRank is from 0 - 10, with 10 being the highest number awarded

Q: How is PageRank Used?
A: PageRank is one of the methods Google uses to determine a page’s relevance or importance. It is only one part of the story when it comes to the Google listing, but the other aspects are discussed elsewhere (and are ever changing) and PageRank is interesting enough to deserve a paper of its own.

Download the Google Toolbar:
To check the PR of any website, the easiest thing to do is download and install the Google Toolbar, which is available separately for both Internet Explorer and Firefox.

Here’s how Google explains PageRank:

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. 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.”

Important, high-quality sites receive a higher PageRank, which Google remembers each time it conducts a search. Of course, important pages mean nothing to you if they don’t match your query. So, Google combines PageRank with sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant to your search. Google goes far beyond the number of times a term appears on a page and examines all aspects of the page’s content (and the content of the pages linking to it) to determine if it’s a good match for your query.

The key rule to understand is that it is a combination of variables that determine how well your site performs in Google. These are the most important variables to worry about:

• Incoming links to your site.
• The relevancy of the content on your website as compared to the pages linking to your site and the PageRank of these pages.
• The keywords that other websites use to link to your site.
• The keywords on your website in places like page titles and headlines.

Some of those factors you can control, such as the keywords on your website. The important thing to understand regarding PageRank is that all those variables will determine how high your site shows up in search engine results.