This is a quick post to explain the difference between:
Search engine placement
Search engine rankings
Google Pagerank
If you’re relatively new to website marketing & search engine optimisation, then there’s a chance you get these mixed up.
Search engine placement – and search engine optimisation (SEO) are one & the same, it means getting your website found on the search engines (SERPS – Search Engine Results Pages), Google & the other major engines, for your important search terms.
Google Pagerank is a different thing, this is one of the systems Google uses to rank pages. So if someone says “My pagerank is 4″ that doesn’t mean their website is number four for a google search for their search terms – it means that according to the Google toolbar, they have a Google Pagerank of 4. Pagerank is a link analysis algorithm which was invented by a guy called Larry Page, one of the founders of Google.
If you’re new to SEO, you’d be better off ignoring Google Pagerank for now, it’s out of date anyway as the toolbar is only updated every so often, so paying attention to the pagerank of your site will be frustrating – and it’s only one piece of the puzzle, there are over 200 parts to Google’s system of ranking sites, so you’d be better off just focusing on creating a valuable content / features as possible, and getting popular sites to link to you based on how good the site is – write articles, submit to free directories (avoid paid backlinks), trade links with niche relevant websites (don’t go over the top with reciprocal links though), and do some research into other strategies, social networking for SEO, social bookmarking, and so on.
Or, you could hire an SEO specialist, of course 
