Tell me what is your PR, and I will tell you where you are. (old saying, a bit rephrased)
While browsing the Internet you probably have seen this abbreviation "PR" and numbers from 0 to 10 associated with web sites. What it stands for? You may guess PR from Public Relations to Posterior Retentive, but the true reading is PageRank. Invented at Stanford University, introduced into practice by Google and as a concept widely adopted by many other search engines, PR, according to Google, is degree of "importance of a web page".
PR essentially is a figure of merit of link popularity of a page. The more inbound links are coming from other pages (external and internal) and the higher PR of these referring pages, the higher will be PR of the page. This is more or less the basis for determination of PR (actual algorithm is more complex). The utility of PR is: if the site is getting a lot of inbound links from high-quality sites, then this is also a good, high-PR site, and the customer directed to this site by search engine will be most certainly satisfied.
Here is an example. Site Alpha of PR 3 has twenty out-links in its index page, while site Beta of PR 2 has two out-links in its home page. Each site has one link pointing to your site home page. Which site will give to your home page higher PR? The answer is Beta. In spite of lower PR, the rank of Beta index page is distributed between smaller number of outbound links (2 vs. 20 in Alpha), which delivers higher PR to your home page.
Home page usually gets the highest PR at the site, because as a rule it receives a majority of inbound links. If the site contains some high-visited pages aside from its index, then PR of such pages can be the same or even higher than home page. However, this will be an exception.
You can determine PR for any pages using Google Toolbar in a browser, or through service sites, of which I would recommend My Google PageRank com (I have no affiliation with them, just a neat site:). Of course, the higher PR of your page, the higher probability that it will be listed on top of search results. Here are some examples of high-PR sites: Wikipedia PR 9, Amazon PR 9, eBay Sitemap PR 7, Google Home got PR 8.
PR 8 or higher will get your site to Olympian heights. Even lower PR can do well. From my own experience, a narrow-focused site of PR 4 can steadily hold first place in search results of Google and Yahoo on all main keywords. PR is important for search algorithms, but obviously this is not the only figure of merit used for building search results hierarchy. So if your pages have PR 0 - 2, this is just a sign that more work is needed. Building more inbound links from related sites, growing your site content and posting in blogs and article directories will be the best ways to improve PR of your pages.
