If you own an online business or know a thing or two about search engines, you’ve probably heard of Google PageRank. PageRank is only one of numerous methods Google uses to determine a web page’s relevance or importance. In terms of traditional understanding, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. Google looks not only at the sheer volume of votes; among 100 other aspects it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. However, these aspects don’t count when PageRank is calculated.

PageRank is based on incoming links, but not just on the number of them – relevance and quality are important as well (in terms of the PageRank of sites, which link to a given site). As you may already know, exchanging links with other webmasters or website owners has been a traditional and most common way of collecting backlinks or “votes” for your web site. Webmasters exchange links to improve traffic through numerous inbound links or link popularity programs. Exchanging links is usually a free process (unless you choose a fee-based link exchange program), making link exchanges cost effective. Link exchange is the key to improve your ranking in organic search results and that’s why it is one of the most cost effective methods of generating relevant traffic.
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