PageRanks in a nutshell

Now that my oldest blog has been accepted by PayPerPost, I start looking through the offers available. I see quite a few with a restriction for "PR 4+" or "PR 3+" etc. I'm thinking to myself "what the heck is a PR and how do you get one?"

I start looking at the PayPerPost site and can find nothing. I check the help and everywhere else I can think of, but nothing on what PR is or how to get it. Then I run across another offer that wants blogs with a "Google Page Ranking of 1 or better." Okay, Page Ranking, PR that makes sense. Then it hits me, "what the hell is a page ranking and how do you get it?" That's when I look at the Google Toolbar in my FireFox browser and notice a little white and green rectangle under the words "PageRank". AHA! That is what they mean, of course, as I mouse over the white box while my page is displayed, it says 0/10. Well that stinks.

A quick Google search of "Google Page Rank" brings me several pages describing how page ranking works and the formulae that goes into it (like I would understand all that math stuff...I get confused just watching commercials for Numb3rs).

The best definition of how PageRank works I found at Wikipedia. This gives some good history, an layman's explanation as well as all those formulae and sigmas about how the rank is acheived. In simpleton's terms, your page is ranked based on how many pages link to it, in addition, the rank of the pages that link to yours is taken into account. So if a page ranked 10/10 has a link to your page, it carries more weight than a page ranked 1/10 that has a link to your page. You get a couple of extra points for big pages being linked to your site than for lesser-known pages being linked to your site.

In trying to find how to increase your page ranking, I came across some of those that are peddling ways to improve your page rank. These programs seem to run about $150. No way am I going to do that (the whole idea here is for extra income, not extra outflow). I don't know how well these work, and I'm not going to fork over the money to find out.

There are a couple of sites I did find that appear to have some steps to help improve one's PageRank.

Web Rank Info - they also have some other areas about Search Engine Optomization (SEO) that I haven't dug into yet.

WebDesign & Review - I think they guy also has an SEO site.

Long story short, the only valid way to get a higher PageRank, is to somehow get other people to link to your site. Preferably people with high page rankings. I don't know if blog rolls can help with this, but they certainly can't hurt. So try to get on as many blogrolls as you can would be my guess.