Search Engines practically use the same process in determining the relevance of websites. What differ are their critera in determining what is pertinent to the search of their users. What appeals to google may not be so appealing to Yahoo! so there goes the no.1 spot on search page. Yahoo! might goes for page keywords while Google looks for page link and prefers older websites.
Today, one good measure of how your website is doing on the net is page rank.Google looks at how the page are linked together. So practically, one page is casting a vote for another page. The more votes, the higher the page rank becomes. It also matters from which websites the vote is coming from. The more important the page is the more important the vote becomes.
Google gives every page of a website a ranking depending on the relevance of the data to the products or services that you offers. Better page rank means you will be among the top listed websites.
You may see some pages given a 0 page rank. This doesn't mean that it has Zero value but rather it is worth very little. The page ranking is exponential so it will not be really that valueable if you move up from 2 to 3. Only a few pages rank beyond 6. Google of course ranks 10.
If a website has a pagerank between 5 to 10, that is considered an optimal page rank. It will be one reason why a certain website will be among the top results when one searches the information.
SEO plays a vital role to design or structure your site so other web pages will linked to it. This will results to better page ranking. On the other hand, the pagerank stats are also vital to determine your SEO needs and strategy.
