my reviews and finds

Excerpt from Monetizers.com:

Ranking high on Google is not all about HTML tricks - you need to create an attractive and useful page, something that people will want to come back to. If other web site administrators like your site they might post links to it on their own pages. All the external links your web page gets are analyzed and computed by Google through a process called PageRank, an innovative search algorithm that processes text information from their web page database a lot faster than other search engines. The higher you page rank, the closer you are to being in the top search results. A good rank can send your page somewhere in the first 50-100 search results shown by the search engine in a particular field. PageRank ranges from 0 t o10, with pages between 7-10 being considered high ranking in Google's search engine.
Basically, PageRank works like this: using a mathematical formula, it calculates the number of links your site has to other web pages and their importance. It's like a vote casting process, each link that appears on another site means a good vote and the importance of the vote is determined by the importance of the site that gives it. In Google's own words (taken from Google's FAQ):
"Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important."
Below you will find the actual PageRank formula used by Google to calculate your web page rank. The amount of your PageRank, which you can pass on when you cast a vote (create a link to a different site than yours), is called a damping factor. The damping factor is known to be .85, and this is a little less then the linking pages own PR.
PR(A) = (1-d) + d(PR(t1)/C(t1) + ... + PR(tn)/C(tn))
PR(A) is the PageRank boost your page A will get after being linked from someone else's site (t1). PR(t1) is the page rank of the site which links to you and C(t1) is the amount of total links that (t1) has. You should keep in mind that a page's voting power is just .85 of that page's actual PR and this gets spread out evenly between the sites it links to. The democratic process of ranking pages that Google uses doesn't reduce the value of a pages rank when it casts a vote on another page. There is no way of transferring PageRank, so the action of linking to another page won't diminish your own rank. Fortunately for us, we don't have to calculate our Page Rank with the above formula, Google offers us an easier method. Your page rank appears in the Google toolbar, where it is constantly refreshed.
You should keep in mind that Google values a link by the ranking of the page it appears on, not the ranking of the site's home page. A link from a popular home page will increase your own ranking more than a link from the same site's secondary pages. If you want to see how many links there are to your existing web page, go to www.google.com and type "link" in the search box, followed by your page's URL. This will give you a better idea where you stand in the Google ranking system. If the inbound links are few in numbers and come from unpopular sites you probably have a zero or very low PageRank rating. Studies have shown that the quality of the link is just as important as the number of incoming links to your site. If you get a link from sites like MSN or Yahoo, your website will grow in Google's rankings, as you are now linked to very respected sites.
Another technique in finding high quality links is by searching for sites that offer site submissions. You can use the following lines in Google:
"add URL" "your keyword phrase"
Also try replacing, "add URL" with any other of these search phrases:
"add a site", "add a link", "submit URL", "submit link", "submit an URL", "submit a link".
The keyword being used to link to your site also plays a crucial role. When asking a site owner to link to your site make sure that you ask them to link with the keyword that you are optimizing that page for. A high percentage of the #1 web pages on Google result pages used the queried keyword in link texts. Nearly one out of four web pages is a very high number so it looks like Google ranks web pages higher if they contain keywords in their link texts. For example, if the keyword is "electronics", the following link text contains the keyword once: href="http://www.domain.com/page.com">Electronics
Linking, in addition to keyword density, should be the main concern of every webmaster that wants his site in a high Google rank.