I use SEO quake. It is a free plug in for Firefox. It tells you everything you need to know in terms of SEO at a quick glance, including PR.
ya offcourse you will get the PR becoz after the SEO the traffic will also increse on ur site hence your PR also incesrsd
do you have your own domain? or is it freehost.com/username ? or username.freehost.com If you have your own domain, google doesn't really care where you have your site hosted.
for that u have to do articles submissions,press release,forums posting, blog commenting on higher pr sites