I read many time that if you want to increase your page rank from 0 to 1, link (getting a backlink ?) your site to other website with higher page rank ( PR, 2,3 etc). I would like to know what exactly does this mean? Does it mean that if i submit one or more articles to ezinearticles, which has a page rank of 5 or 6, and place my website link there, it would help my PR ? Is that is what is meant by 'getting a link from other site'? If not what exactly does it mean? Also to get a PR 2 or 3 from a PR 0, appx. how many link (baclinks) should be enough? Can anyone be more specific about these stats ? Thanks.
Toolbar Pagerank is still focussed on far too much and shouldn't be - it is pretty meaningless. However, concentrating on getting links from sites that have the same content as your own is very important and should make up a huge portion of any SEO campaign. Just to add something, I have seen sites with a toolbar pagerank of 2, appear at the top of a search engine, and also those with a pagerank of 4-5 not showing in the first 3 pages - there is a lot more at work that you don't see.
Pagerank is only increased by building backlinks; this being said each web page has it's own pagerank value, it's called pagerank, not website rank. This means that in order to have a PR5 backlink the link needs to come from a web page that has a PR5 value; you can easily see as you navigate through a site that the pagerank value changes constantly because each web page has its own unique value. There is no "specific" amount of links from a "specific pagerank" value web page to obtain "X" pagerank value. So many factors comes into play like other outbound links and internal links that it's almost impossible to make that judgment. Don't worry about backlinks and instead worry about building relevant quality backlinks and the pagerank value will come naturally.
Thanks both of you for the replies. I would also like to know if there is a tool that can accurately tell the pagerank. Most of the tools that i have seen only tell the rank of the home page (website's pagerank?)
Those tools will check all web page's pagerank value, just enter the full URL. Alternately you can Google "internal pagerank checker" and find a tool that crawls an entire site and gives the value of each web page.