It's not about winning or losing. It's just that PR is a measure of links. That's the foundation behind Google. They've moved away from PR in how they determine what pages to display in search results, but the PR part is based entirely on links.

I think people confuse PageRank with how a page ranks. They're two different things.

Your content plays a role in where your page will rank and content can help you get more links. But your content isn't going into the equation for PR.

relevant high pr links will fetch you PR

Relevancy has nothing to do with PR. A page about hummingbirds will give as much PR as a page about big red fire engines (all else being equal).

My site has a pagerank of 0, and i appear top of google for "Static Chaos" and "Php minimap" which is just about all the site is right now, its just a place for my to throw my tutorials, and host **** for my friends.

Worry about content first!

Agreed. I hope you didn't take any of my posts here as an indication I don't believe in having good content. I do and I think it's far more important than PageRank. It just doesn't have anything to with how PR is calculated, other than potentially bringing more links into the site.

But yes, content first.

Submitting to directories that are just beggining helps a lot, because you get listed for free and without any recyprocal link request.

Tips for achieving high PR is summarized to one phrase "get more quality backlink of higher PR sites".

You know, I have to agree after years of fussing with this trying to get my PR higher. I started at six, then went to five for the longest time and now just recently, dropped to a four! (GASP!!! ) Drives me batty because I have thousands of pages of content, re-designed for standards compliance -- all that work, all those hours and the PR drops to 4. So, after reading as much as I could about PR Rank, I decided to take the general attitude among many of you -- pay attention to it, yet; lose sleep over it? NO! I'd sure love that "5" or "6" back, yes, and will strive to keep improving, but won't make myself batty over it any longer.

My biggest issue now is finding those quality back links as I've gotten pretty fussy about them. The field I'm in is outrageously competitive and I get a lot of junk sites tossed at me for link swaps so I know I've been lax in this area and I guess my PR is showing it, huh. What do you do??

Jeni, I look at it this way: would I want the link if a search engine didn't exist?

In the case of any one-way link, sure! I'll take any link that will send me traffic that I don't have to send back in turn.

In the case of a link exchange, no. I link to sites that I think are worthwhile to my end users, and the silly link swapping idea doesn't provide those types of sites.

My goal is always to provide content that generates organic links, and I've been fairly successful at it (I'd say about 10-15% of my content gets linked to organically...while obviously I'd like that to be a lot higher, I still need to get more traffic to the sites I work on first.) Good content has a way of spreading to other people without the owner of it having to do much work, and that's what most of the PageRank crowd misses completely.