If you just started blogging, you may have heard this phrase floating around: “page rank”.

As a new blogger, eagerly awaiting your rise in popularity and an inflow of traffic, you will soon discover that there are several systems out there that rank the popularity of your blog.  Page Rank is probably the most well known and most used system.

There are a variety of other ranking systems out there and they each provide their own way of ranking websites and blogs.

• Google PageRank
• Alexa
• Compete
• MozRank
• Technorati

Google PageRank

Probably the most used way of measuring a blogger’s popularity, Page Rank is a system developed to measure the importance and relevance of sites on the internet.  The scale goes from 0 to 10, and “Page Rank” is usually abbreviated to “PR”.

Your PR is determined by the number of pages that link to your website or blog and by the page rank of those pages that are linked to your blog.  So the more pages that link to you, the better. Your PR will also be increased if someone with a high PR is linking to you.  A link from a page with a PR of 1 will not make too much of a difference, but a link with a PR of 7 will.  In fact, this will help raise your PR a little bit, too.

So to recap, your PR will be higher based on:

• The number of pages linking to you (more is better)
• The PR of those pages (higher PR linking to you is better)

Those with higher PRs will appear higher in Google’s search results, although there are a few other factors that help determine how high you appear in these results.

To check your PR, you can go to this PR checker, or you can install Google’s tool bar.

Don’t stress out over your PR for now.  As a beginner blogger, your PR will probably not be that high.  Focus on building unique content first, and then start promoting  your blog.  Don’t be impatient about your PR, it will come in time.