What is the exact role of Page Rank?

If you have a website, you probably want it to be seen by as many people as possible.
Ok, how to go about it systematically?
Do you agree that approximately around 85% of visitors find a website through search engines? So, if you improve your search engine rankings you’re going to improve the number of hits your website gets every day?
The balance 15% of visits are made possible through several factors like links to your website found in directories, blogs and signatures.

Wondering what the best way is to increase link popularity on your website? Google currently drives the most traffic to websites that rank at the top of their organic results.

In this process what Google really looks for now are links pointing to your website from many different sources on the Internet.

Here is an interesting observation made by the Internet marketing giant USWeb.
“Page Rank is still a factor in that scenario, but there is a lot to be said about receiving 1000 links from different websites as opposed to receiving 100 links from different websites with a good Page Rank. Nobody can tell you the exact difference in the quality of one over the other but in our experience 1000 links from different websites with low levels of Page Rank work better in increasing your rankings within the organic results of Google.”

Read it again to realize its importance mate.

Google also gives weightage to where the link is placed on the website and gives more value when the link is within textual content as opposed to sitting at the bottom of the page in a list of links.

Google also looks at the text that surrounds the link and determines how targeted that text is compared to the page that the link points to.

I could go on and on but it is better you read it yourself leisurely by clicking on the link in this blog post.