"The heart of our software is PageRank,
a system for ranking web pages developed
by our founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Stanford University"
Pagerank is a proprietary (patented) system of rating a web pages
"Importance" based on the number of incoming links
to that page.
The basic theory goes like this. "The more people who link to
your page the more important it must be".
Added to this is "The more important the page linking to yours,
the more important your page must be".
Therefore you can see that to make it in their search engine You
Need incoming links to your web site, without incoming links your
site is dead in the water. Not only will people not be able to find
it, but Google the biggest search engine, will most likely ignore it
or drop it in their SERP's (explanation).
How can you tell what your page rank is ?
You need to download and install a program from google called a toolbar.
this allows you to perform searches of google from within your Browser
at anytime. it also shows your pagerank and has many other
functions such as search within a site, backward links and a popup
blocker.
I highly recommend this little tool, I use
it at least a fifty times a day.
Get it from here Google Toolbar