Forget the pretty little overrated page rank bar. It's only use is for bragging and selling text links, which now get you penalized anyway.

Think Link Popularity! If your playing Google it's a must to get any kind of traffic from this engine. Trading links dates back fro the beginning of the web and still hold true as the most important "free" way to gain ground in search results.

The next or as important is content!
If you have the most informative...