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Firstly, we should define what Google rank, or PageRank actually is, because it may not be what you think, or what you should be looking for. You may have searched for "rank higher in Google", or "how to rank in Google".

According to Google:

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. In essence, 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".

In other words, Google assigns a rank to your website or web page, from 0 to 10, according to the sites that link to it, and how important Google determines those sites to be.

For example, if you have one PR8 page linking to you, the chances are your page (or site) will be PR6. To see an estimate of the values need to achieve a certain PageRank, please view our PageRank table.

So now you know what PageRank actually is, now we should discuss what you were probably looking for, which is how to get better results in search engine pages - commonly referred to as SERPs (search engine results pages).

A site can have a low to medium page rank, but still do very well in the SERPs. It doesn't mean to say that a high PageRank will have no effect on your site, but whereas a couple of years ago it was the "golden chalice" everyone was chasing, now SERPs are regarded as far more important, and PageRank is merely an indication of the sites that link to you and how important they are.

To achieve good Google results, you have to understand that Google's mission is to:

...organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.

A couple of key words here are "information" and "accessible".

Information, or content, is crucial to Google fulfilling its mission. Therefore, the more information you have about a particular subject, brand, product, or whatever, the better off you will be. The old adage, "content is king" remains true to this day. The content on each page should be original and not too long, but certainly no less than than about 300 words.

Relevance also plays a key role, however it is possible to achieve a good result with what is essentially irrelevant content. For example, justweb gets very good Google results for "law articles". Good content will only get you so far - and this is where experienced search engine optimisation comes into play.

Once you have your content, the information should then be organised into an "accessible" format. This is not crucial to achieving good SERPs, however it IS a factor that Google looks at. Accessibility is defined as:

The practice of making websites usable by people of all abilities and disabilities. When sites are correctly designed, developed and edited, all users can have equal access to information and functionality. For example, when a site is coded with semantically meaningful HTML, with textual equivalents provided for images and with links named meaningfully, this helps blind users using text-to-speech software and/or text-to-Braille hardware.

There are many other factors that help achieve better search engine results, such as video, images, audio, social bookmarking, etc., but the best way for you to improve your own SERPs is to have a website audit performed in which a report is provided that will help you see what you need to do to get better Google results.