The basic factor is how important your site is. Important sites get higher PageRanks.

I know that's not the answer you wanted, but it's the truth. Lots of people have schemes. They might work for a little while, but Google figures them out and often punishes participants.

The best information can be found here: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answe...

In basic: Links to you from reputable sources help you. Having your pages have good content for users helps you. Doing anything to manipulate Google will hurt you eventually. Hiding things (like with CSS), trying to load up on keywords, duplicating content, and other sneaky things hurt you. Hiding content behind a registration or other thing a search engine can't do hurts you. Being browsable with a text browser helps you.

Google's software is advanced. If you put something in an H1, it will realize that it's important to your page. However, if you then resize it to 10px, it's likely to pick up that you're using H1s inappropriately as the Googlebot now grabs CSS as well.

And PageRank often isn't as important as other factors. For example, let's say you want users to find your site when they search for "blog". If people are linking to you with the line "There are cool accounts at [site name]!", that's not going to count much to the keyword "blog". However, if people are linking to you with "Get a [free blog] over at site name!" it'll help a lot more. The fact is that one doesn't care about PageRank so much as one cares about where they get placed in results for certain keywords.

Most of it is just common sense. If your site has compelling content, it will be seen positively. If it doesn't, it won't. It becomes harder and harder every day to fool Google. I suggest not trying. Best case, it boosts you for a short while. Worst case, you get delisted.

      The basic factor is how important your site is. Important sites get higher PageRanks.

Well... that's somewhat of a self fulfilling prophecy. Sites that get high PR show up first in search results, which helps them get more traffic, becoming more well known, hence becoming "important".

PR solves for your score (self consistently) by basically averaging out all the scores of everybody linking to you while coupling this with a (rather crude) model of user behavior. Of course, this is how it's described in the original paper and definitely very far from what actually goes on under the hood now a days.

It should also be noticed that several improvements on/replacements for PR have been suggested over the years, with:

TrustRank http://www.vldb.org/conf/2004/RS15P3.PDF

BrowseRank http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/tyliu/fp032-liu.p...

HITS http://www.cs.cornell.edu/home/kleinber/auth.pdf

being the better known ones. Alternatives usually revolve around improving the user behavior model (like including real traffic data in the calculation http://www.informatics.indiana.edu/fil/Papers/click.pdf ), but there is still a lot of work to be done in this field (there's couple of interesting papers coming out in WSDM09 and WWW09 about this).

There's no easy way to improve it. It's logarithmic, so each jump you make is substantially more difficult than the previous. They tweak it sometimes when they find out how people are gaming it, so every time you try to find some "trick" they're going to fix it. I spoke with one of the engineers who works on the core algorithms and page rank team, and they tweak that stuff sometimes hundreds of times a day. They're extremely diligent, so you won't figure out a way to easily increase your page rank.

The best way is to get highly credible sites to cover you. Time is taken into account (how long your domain has been up), the amount of content on your web site, how relevant your content is to a search query at the time, the amount of traffic you receive, amongst several other things that are more minuscule. You're best hope is to just do whatever you do really well so that it inspires people to talk about you.

A good way to get a highly credible link is to contact your old university, tell them your story and they may decide to feature you on their news section (promoting enterprise is a big thing for most universities now). Worked for me, within a month of being featured on my uni's news page we were top of google page rank for 'fair trade jewellery' - of course you need to do everything else right too.

Has anyone used website.grader.com? If so did you find it helpful?

thought that was a scam from a marketng depertment

It's a service from HubSpot.com - owner is publisher of onstartups.com. Random posts from said blog appear on HN frontpage.

Indeed, some of my OnStartups.com posts do show up on the HN front page. Hopefully, it's not completely random and some people do find the articles useful.

Random was not meant derogatorily.

Google Official Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide: http://www.google.com/webmasters/docs/search-engine-optimiza...

Note: Link to PDF

Here is a case study about how big company like 1800flower boost the page ranking.

http://blog.ask2link.com/case-study-advertisers-get-great-re...

More links point to your site than your site points out to others, basically. Quality of links is taken into account, of course, so permanent front page of a high pagerank could boost yours quite a bit.