The above tool will check a domain name for the Google PageRank and The Alexa Rank for the website URL (website address) entered. What these are exactly and how they affect the search engine placement of your site are explained as follows:

Google PageRank
Google PageRank is a numeric value, between 1 and 10, that represents how important a page is on the web. When one page links to another page, it is effectively casting a vote for the other page. The more votes that are cast for a page, the more important the page must be. Also, the importance of the page that is casting the vote determines how important the vote itself is. Google calculates a page's importance from the votes cast for it. How important each vote is is taken into account when a page's Google PageRank is calculated.

PageRank is Google's way of deciding a page's importance. It matters because it is one of the factors that determines a page's ranking in the search results. It isn't the only factor that Google uses to rank pages, but it is an important one.

Alexa Ranking
Alexa is a very powerful tool used to rank web site traffic. Alexa provide information based on statistical analysis of browsing patterns, page count on websites, how often the site is updated and other critical information to create a statistical map of website popularity which is used by some search engines to show a websites popularity.

Remember: "The lower the Alexa ranking number the more heavily visited the site."

Some examples are:

• amazon.com (rank 34);

• bbc.co.uk (rank 61);

• ebay.co.uk (rank 91)

• google.com (rank 4);

• yahoo.com (rank 1).

These rankings are generally consistent with the amount of traffic the websites have.