If you are interested in improving your website’s search engine ranking — and, realistically, what online business owner isn’t — I highly recommend checking out this explanation of Google’s PageRank system.

When you Google a word or a phrase, the ordering of the list of results is determined by two things: link popularity and search term relevance.

Link popularity is what is used to determine a website’s PageRank.  Basically, Google’s spiders take into account the number and quality of the links pointing back to a site.  By analyzing the inbound links, Google is able to come up with a number between 1 and 10, which is known as the site’s PageRank.  A site with lots of high quality links will get a higher number than a site that doesn’t have very many links, or only has links from other unimportant sites.

Search term relevance means that the original search terms are related to the actual content of the site.  Google’s spiders determine this by looking for the keyword(s) in the page’s meta tags, title, headings, and early in the page’s copy.  A page that has keywords in all the right places will earn a higher ranking than one that only mentions the search terms once or twice.

If you want to increase your website’s PageRank, you will need to increase link popularity as well.  This doesn’t mean, however, that you should run out and get lots of obscure websites or blogs to link to your site.  In order to genuinely build link popularity, you need quality links as well as quantity.  In other words, a whole lot of links from piddly little sites may not do you nearly as much good as a dozen links from really large, well-known sites.

Technorati Tags: link popularity, increase link popularity, build link popularity