A simple guide for increasing your page rank

Page rank, page rank and more page rank. Everybody is speaking about this, but few know how to increase it or what does it means. So I’ll start with the basis.

Definition (quote google): "PageRank reflects our view of the importance of web pages by considering more than 500 million variables and 2 billion terms. Pages that we believe are important pages receive a higher PageRank and are more likely to appear at the top of the search results.
PageRank also considers the importance of each page that casts a vote, as votes from some pages are considered to have greater value, thus giving the linked page greater value. We have always taken a pragmatic approach to help improve search quality and create useful products, and our technology uses the collective intelligence of the web to determine a page's importance."

And you'll say: "yeah right, and what are the most important variables?".

Looking throughout forums, blogs and lots of internet website I found how chaotic these info are. So I’ve begin testing it myself and trusting only official facts. This is a top that I have made about what really counts (you can find a more subjective look here; look for the vote pool in the left menu):
1) Search Engine Submission. First step should be the submission of your url to the most relevant search engines. Why? Because if the search engine don't know you exist than no one can find you.
2) Link building. Even from the definition given from google you can see that this is the major factor. The higher the rank of the page that points to you the higher your rank will become, however, every link to your site counts. This link building includes: social bookmarks, blogs, comments, forum posting, directory submission and others that points to your site.
3) Optimize your page, make it search engine friendly. This is also very important. When someone searches for a product/service the search engine will give results based on your keywords relevancy. Don't over look this! Even if you have a high page rank, a small rank competitive site can show up higher in search results, because it has more relevancies from the point of view of the search engine algorithm. The sitemap, meta description and meta keywords are very important for your website and for any post you make: forum, articles, directories, etc.
4) Receive Traffic. The problem with traffic is a delicate one. Some says that google ads ban people that drive traffic to their website. From an objective point a view, i don't know how they can do this as long as they are real visitors, they can't, it doesn't make any sense! Even more, Alexa it's using this data to increase the alexa ranking and it's doing this from years. Also, looking on the internet i found a patent issued by Yahoo that also uses the traffic logs for their search engine rankings.

You can also find good faq's here: RankBoosting.com. These guys actually do all the work manually, saving you lots of wasted time. Also good support from them, ask and you'll receive an answer fast.
Cheers!