This days there are thousands of ways out there of improving your PR, your popularity... all by "amazing SEO experts", although most of them are so vague that you'll never know if they actually worked...

The best way to optimize your site, and to improve your PR is to do some simple things, that often turn up to be great ideas. One of them was presented by Luis Gross, in Top Business Reviews.
He realized that backlinks from .edu and .gov domains act as a link from a PR6 or more website. Now the question is, how can I get links from that kind of sites? And there is a simple way, blogs and forums.

To help you find blogs and forums that are part of .edu or .gov domains you can use this simple Google "hacks":

inurl:.gov+inurl:blog
inurl:.gov+inurl:forum
inurl:.edu+inurl:blog
inurl:.edu+inurl:forum

Once you have found some, you'll need to know whether the comments have rel="nofollow" or not. If you don't feel like checking the source code, and you are (hopefully) using Firefox or Mozilla browsers, you can use an extension called Search Status that amongst other features highlights nofollow links.