What is Page Rank?

This is a term that gets thrown around like biscuit dough in a Southern cafe. But I expect few people actually know what it means. According to Wikipedia:

Page Rank is a link analysis algorithm, named after Larry Page, used by the Google Internet search engine that assigns a numerical weighting to each element of a hyperlinked set of documents, such as the World Wide Web, with the purpose of “measuring” its relative importance within the set.

What? Larry Page? Gee, I thought it was something about a Google index page. Interesting, isn’t it?

In SEO it is enlightening to periodically run a ranking report of the website to get a picture of how the site is ranking for certain terms over periods of time. This helps us gauge how “relevant” the page is according to what changes or enhancements we have made to it – basically, what is working or what isn’t making an impact.