Does more links or higher PR really mean higher rankings in SE for your pages ? I have seen some of the articles bookmarked on my site rank higher than the original source of those articles even though all those sites have higher PR .. traffic .. higher everything. I know very little about the subject so was just wondering if its really something that still matters or is it just something that mattered in the past.
Pagerank is something that doesn't matter much in search engine results. Using descriptive keywords in the anchor text when you develop backlinks to your site not only does help; it is one of the most important factors in ranking your pages.
It's widely regarded as a factor accounting for 70% of SEO... So, even if that figure is considerably off... it still matters... There are many SEO factors at work. Google algorithms are tweaked a number of times every week... so that could be a variety of factors at play in you own personal experience which you write about above...
Forget the PR whoring. Thats pretty much putting the cart in front of the wagon. What you want is visitors, not numbers. Try to get links from where your target audience hangs out. The rest comes naturally.
Look at what Google says about these matters, and make your own decision. Source: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=34432&query=better+rank&topic=&type= Source: http://www.google.com/corporate/tech.html
High PR does not guarantee high SERPs results (wouldn't it be great if it were that simple!) I tend to use PR as a continuing health check - with a new site in particular, if the PR is increasing over time, then my marketing efforts are working, if not, then I need to put something right. Of course, as it gets tougher to increment to each successive PR value, this is less useful as a site matures.
Link building definitely does help. I recently did some for a site that had hardly any backlinks to it. It was in the search engines but way down the list in searches for the keywords I was targeting. After about twenty forum posts (with the URL in the signature) and as many free directory inclusions it's now on page 2 of Google for those main keywords. May start to slide down the list, of course. (And it's not in a hugely competitive niche.) Still, those links definitely helped a lot.
The search engines these days factor in back links as one of the most important criteria. Make sure you get your on page optimization done right (page title, page description, H1 tags, keywords in your text, etc.) then get links back to your site from related pages with variations of the keywords you used on your site as the anchor text. You'll see your site move up in the SERPs for those keywords.
It's usually regarded as extremely helpful for inclusion. It's also important for pagerank, which many regard as unimportant.
Build links, forget pagerank. Links are the only way to get people from someone else's site to yours. Thus, you need links. Oh by the way, all PR measures is relative link weight. Thus, forget about PR and just get links.