PageRank

PageRank and Search Engine Optimization goes hand in hand when designing a website. PageRank is a numeric value that represents how important a page is on the web. Google has worked out that when one page links to another page, it is 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 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.

Not all links are counted by Google. For instance, links from known link farms are filtered out . Some links can cause a site to be penalized by Google. They rightly figure that webmasters cannot control which sites link to their sites, but they can control which sites they link out to. For this reason, links into a site cannot harm the site, but links from a site can be harmful if they link to penalized sites. So be careful which sites you link to.

Inbound links

One way to increase a website's total PageRank is for a webmaster to add inbound links (links into the website from the outside). Another way is to add more pages to your website. It doesn't matter where the links come from. It is recognised by Google that when designing a website a webmaster has no control over other websites linking into a site, and so websites are not penalized because of where the links come from.