Question regarding PR etc.

I've got a very new site and as well as trying to add lots more content, I'm also learning what I can about Seo. I wondered whether any of you could help me out with understanding PR, links, metatags etc. I thought I understoods the basics of attempting to get high rankings, until searching in Google under 'online casinos', and finding that the majority of the 1st and 2nd page had no pr; I then ran a meta-tag analyzer tool on some of them and that didn't come up with very good results for them either, it recommended that most of them needed some major changes. They all do have excellent links pages, but from what I've read this helps but is not the be all and end all of high rankings. So...what are they doing to get up there? I'm probably missing a very obvious answer :o Apologies if I am, my brain has turned into an 18 hour cybersponge at the moment, trying to get as much information as possible to make my site a success.

Many thanks for any input
Penny

They had no PR (pagerank)?
Your using the google toolbar right?

I do find sometimes when I click into a website it gives a "Grayed" out Pagerank. Meaning no reading what so ever, which has to be a bug because its often a website I *know* has PR. To check just click on one the websites internal links and that usually shows a value.

As to how there ranked highly its a function of how they have optimised their internal pages and how many backward links they have. You can easily check the backwards link out using the toolbar: Page Info > Backwards links.
Take the #1 results for "casinos" who has a PR of 7.
http://www.google.com/search?sourcei...sinos%2Ecom%2F

They have 1700 backwards links showing. Apparantly only those backwards link of a PR 4 or greater show up on that search. Other links of lower PR still add weight to your website, they just don't show up..

In google the meta tags have no effect on your search engine ranking. Google does how ever use the description tag sometimes as your sites description in searchs.

Most of what I just said is what I've read, I'm not a self proclaimed expert, so if any disagree's post away..

Penny,
Maybe i can clarify this issue. There is indeed a bug in the google toolbar so it shows grey most of the time when you click on a website to see its PR. This does not mean that there is no PR for that site. When you search in google for any keyword and the results come up, one way to overcome this bug is by clicking on the website but opening it in a new window. This would give you the real PR of that site. As for why they are ranking high, there can be many reasons. Although i haven't seen very well optimized sites, i have seen a lot of backlinks for these sites. The site that dahammer2 pointed out about, i call it my God Site. It has 1700 links. Most of them are internal links. However, i have seen it and many other well ranking sites getting links to the home page of many sites. This boosts their PR as well as traffic and get them indexed faster. Anyways, Getting 1700 links is not a small thing. This simply means that you've got to optimize your site well + need a lot of backlinks to get that high.
Hope this helps.

Thanks both of you, very helpful advice and the 'bug' explains my confusion. Best crack on and get my 1700 links then :)

Penny

here's how I fix the 'grayed out' problem with the google toolbar.

View the backlinks of a page which has a grey PR.

Once google loads, hit the back button on your browser (thereby going back to the page in question). The PR should now be shown.

Don