What the heck is a Google PageRank and why should I care?

I know I've mentioned before that my ipod has very little music and tons of podcasts. Well, I'm totally loving it for two reasons.
1. I'm training because I'm going to run the Race for the Cure in October and I my goal is to beat my best time. My best time was when I was 26 years old and now, at 32 I plan to shave off a full minute. Listening to podcasts helps me zone out and not realize how extremely hot it is here in south Florida and how much my legs ache when I run. Makes time fly.
2. I am learning so much. I got a ton of great tips from some recent podcasts on SEO (search engine optimization). I'm pretty sure that there are tons of people out there that will just say 'Duh' to themselves as they read this, but because I had no idea, maybe it will be useful to some, so I'm posting what I learned this week.
The podcast that I found to be most useful this week is one called "Internet Marketing" that I found on itunes. It is from a UK company and these guys have the cutest accents so not only did I learn alot, I was impressed with the pleasant sounds too.
They talked about some stuff that was WAY over my head but I was able to glean a few nuggets of worthy info about Google PageRank. I'd heard internet folks talk about this before but never really understood. I just kept thinking it was about how close you are to the top of the page when someone does a search. Well, that is not it. I kept thinking that it was a dumb judgement because if I typed in exactly the right words, I could manipulate just about any site to come up at the top!
It is a ranking that google gives your site from zero to 10. Zero being bad and 10 being great. I've been searching for two days and the only 10 I've found was google themselves! This blog is a zero. eBay is an 8.
The way to find out a site's PageRank is to add it to your google toolbar. If you don't already have one just go get the toolbar (it is free) by searching "google toolbar" and when you are setting it up, click to include "PageRank". Voila, once the toolbar is there you can see the rank of any site you visit. If you already have a google toolbar you can add the page rank feature by going into the settings.
For your convenience (and my profit) I have a google searchbox right here on this page :)

Another cool feature of the PageRank button on the toolbar is that you can check backward links on any site. It is a dropdown next to the PageRank button and is pretty cool. I checked my site Addicted to Rockabilly, and found a couple of people that were linking to me that I was completely unaware of. I was also surprised to find that none of my blogs show up as linking to my site. Hmmmm? I have links all over anything I have control of, maybe they aren't there because they are all zero page ranks. :(
The long way to find backward links is to type link:http:// then the site you want to check into the google search engine.

Ok, so the reason that you want to know about your backward links is because that is exactly how google ranks you! So, if lots of good sites (meaning not the zero ranks) have non-advertising links to you than you will rank higher. Advertising links and reciprocal links don't count.

Now, I need to go figure out a way to get folks to link to my sites. :)