For the last couple weeks I have been listening to several interviews my friend Andy Jenkins did with Brad Fallon about Brad's phenomenal success his first year online.

[Brad made over $130,000 in sales last month from his little store-and that was only his fifth month in business]

While these audios are not yet available to anyone yet, I wanted to tell you about some of the things I have been picking up.

One of the key lessons is on the importance of Google page rank.

Every page is ranked by Google with a number from 1 to 10. By page I mean every page on every website, not just the site as a whole. This number is called "page rank" or just PR.

You can find out any page's PR by downloading the Google toolbar:

http://toolbar.google.com

This number represents how "important" Google thinks your page is-which can have a huge impact on how your site will show up in their search engine results.

But it's not as simple as: "A page rank 10 page beats a page rank 9, 8 beats 7," etc. Nope, it's a little more complex.

Google looks at page rank, in simple terms, to determine how much your "vote" for other sites counts. And for how much their "vote" for you counts.

Let me use an example:

Suppose I have a site called "WidgetsRUs.com" where I sell widgets. When people go to Google and type in "widgets" I want my site to rank highly on the search engines.

So, I send samples of my widgets to several "widget review" sites:

BestWidgets.com with a page rank of 7 Widget-Review.org with a page rank of 6 WidgetsArePeopleToo.com with a page rank of 7

Now, pretend that each of these sites reviews my widget and places an article on their PR 7 or PR 6 page with a direct link to my site, WidgetsRUs.com.

Google then looks at my site as having several "votes" from important sites-and is likely to list my site more highly in the search engine results.

How This Can Help You?

Since Google thinks "votes" from higher PR pages are more important than from low PR pages, you want to have not only many pages linking to yours, but as many high PR pages-those with a PR of 5 or above-as possible.

One PR 8 link to your page might be worth as many as 3,000 PR 4 pages linking to your page.

While this is only a small part of an overall search engine strategy, it is a very important part.

"There is as much opportunity in change as there is danger."
-- Earl Nightingale