How to Increase PAGE RANK?

You are getting some good advice in this thread. Buying a PR5 site (preferably 2!) is a good idea. If you are lucky you can get them below $1,000 each.

Regarding the PR you need for ranking, remember that PR is only one of the 200+ Google ranking factors. But for simplicity, it's helpful to think of a ranking as a product: relevance times PR. This may not be literally true, but it's likely to be something like/close enough to the truth. This would explain why sometimes low-PR but more relevant sites beat higher-PR sites. A combo of high relevance and hi PR is the best of both worlds, of course.

+1
I have a site (1 week old) with PR n/a and it's got a nice seat at #5 for one of its keywords. It's beating sites with much more PR. One thing I learned quickly when I got into this was that PR wasn't a huge deal when it comes to beating another site. You really have to analyze the sites you'll be competing with and determine if it's worth going after.

???

I have tons of 0/NA PR pages on page 1 of Google. It isn't hard and has nothing to do with PR.

Building backlinks --> SERP ranking improvements
Building backlinks --> PR

But PR does not equal SERP rankings.

Some backlinks may help SERP rankings, some backlinks may help PR, and some backlinks may help both SERP rankings and PR.

Sure, depending on the backlinks sometimes PR and SERP rankings are correlated, but that is a completely different story to say that they are causally related.

In other words, you are focusing on the same thing. If you build the backlinks with SERP ranking in mind, will you likely get some PR? Sure. But, I have no doubt you can get to PR5 without much SERP ranking improvement at all also. Again, focus on the backlinks.

Tom

Wasting your time focusing so much on PR....

Build backlinks... and PR will come eventually. Personally I think Google is going to throw PR out the window for another method.

PR is just a tiny portion of what determines your ranking.

Your on page SEO and backlinks are more important to focus on.

You have to remember that Google places sites like that in the search results when their isn't a better match. That was the closest match it found that was trusted to give you information pertaining to your search.

Meaning you are searching for: How to Bake a Chocolate Filled Cake

Google knows a bunch of cooking sites out there talk about baking a chocolate cake. They don't really fit perfectly but they were the best match up for you at the moment.

However because of your on page optimization and backlinks your page is really about Baking a chocolate filled cake...so your little PR0 beat out the the page that was just general chocolate cakes. Even though they were an authority on different types of cakes.

You always want to be the best match you can be. This means content that talks about various chocolate filled cakes... linking to other content on your site talking about chocolate filled cakes...linking to other content talking about chocolate filled cakes. Linking them with the keywords you are targeting. This internal linking structure will help you build relevance to a crawler for all things about chocolate filled cakes or whatever.

Then you need to build your backlinks linking to these internal pages as well. Not just the main domain.

You may not become #1 overnight for your term. Your competition may be authority sites on cooking that have been around for 10 years. However if you do everything right you will take them over even if it is 12 months down the road when your domain has matured.

See this is why people build all the time. There are a lot of things I can look at instantly and say yeah I should be able to grab that top spot in 90 days or less... But then their are some things you want to rank for that are just going to take time and persistence. You don't work on them all the time. You work on them occasionally... once a week or once every two weeks... You can't spend all your time on them because you won't be making money from them until they move up in the rankings.

Build your backlinks from:
RSS submissions, Article Directories, Forum Links, Video Sites, Press Releases, Blog links, Web 2.0 properties, social bookmarks, lay some link bait ...etc...etc...etc...

Another thing is traffic your site gets... Google pays attention to how much traffic you get. They track all this data from other sites, their doubleclick crap, their toolbar, etc... (But that is all I'm going to say about that... have to figure that one out on your own)

To each their own, but my own experience has been that articles on sites like EZA, GOA, etc., have helped neither PR nor SERP ranking. Time is better spent with more productive activities.

Articles are great and I mentioned them...however they aren't given a lot of weight in the grand scheme of ranking one of your pages. Certain directories are great for direct traffic, others are backlink cannon fodder sites. They fall into the diversity of links. Another form of linking that is not the be all end all of backlinks. You really have to have links from all sorts of places. Some articles that rank help you rank an external page better not because of the backlink but because of the traffic they produce... which falls into the hint I was trying to make at the end of my last post.

Tom actually said my thoughts exactly here:
Except I do feel they help serp ranking in the overall portfolio of backlinks you have...unless they are all from article directories.

Join forums, forums are a great way to achieve links to your website. In most forums you are allowed to have a signature and in your signature you can put a link to your website. But another important note to look on is making sure the forum is somewhat related to your website. You will still get credit if it's not, but if it's related to your website than you will be accomplishing two tasks at once.

PR does not matter for small competition, but for big competition, it does seem to matter.

If the term is millions of results and (important) is being actively SEO'd by others, than I'm sure your PR will be taken into consideration. Check out your competition for the term you are after...are they applying SEO on it, and is it highly competitive?

What kind of backlinks would you suggest?

PR depend upon the number of relevant dofollow backlink and that is the way to increase PR. So to increase PR you need to increase the backlinks along with quality.