Pagerank & AlexaRank
Pagerank is the value of a site according to google. It is basically googles' little star rating system for sites. It goes from 0 to 10. Every site in the world has a rating unless its less than 4 months old. There is a lot of skeptical thoughts on if pagerank makes a difference but to a webmaster in the business for years, they know its important. Having a high Pagerank is important because your site becomes more respected by the google search engine, the public, and estimated value. High PR sites just do better over all. If you submitted your site to many directories then you would know that many list the sites in the order of PR so the higher your site is, the high it'll be listed. Also if you offer premium links then the value goes up to sell links to put up on your sites. People really struggle with getting a higher pr even though there's no real secret to moving up.
There is many aspects that will bring up your pr. Domain age, advertising, submitting to directories, having unique content within your site, alt tags for pics in your site, etc. There's too much to list here, but if you advertise where ever you can then you'll move up in time.
Also, another little trick people use is buying a link at another site that is a higher pagerank. Google does not like this and may penalize your site by dropping it from the search engine, but I assume that they don't really catch to many people. Buying a link from a pr 5 site will most likely make your site a pr 4 or 5 the next update. You may be thinking now “why doesn't everyone just buy a pr 10 then?”
Well a simple answer to that one is that a pr 10 link usually sells in the price range of $4,000 to $8,000 per month. However a pr 4 you could purchase for maybe $4 to $10 a month. Personally, I'm not a big buyer. I just submit to a wack load of directories and advertise like crazy until I reach a point to sell links of my own.
Places to check your google Pagerank
http://www.digpagerank.com
http://www.checkpagerank.com/
http://www.iwebtool.com/pagerank_checker
AlexaRank
http://www.alexa.com Alexa homepage.
Alexa rank is a traffic rank that a lot of people follow up on for their site. The rule books of alexa claim that the traffic of your site is analyzed by the traffic you get from the alexa toolbar, all sites submitted there are places in a rank from 1 to close to 12,000,000. Sites which eventually go under 100,000 will be given special rights to extra statistics for the site. The ranks are known to webmasters to be a little manipulated so if you are buying a site from someone do not depend on its alexarank as a proof of traffic. Some webmasters have found a way around to move up in the charts. If you haven't submitted your site to alexa, you should though. Go to the site and in the search bar type in “yoursite.com”, if the site is not there, you'll have the option to add it. It may ask you to validate but its just another place to have your site added.
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