How to increase website pagerank?

Does a link, from high pageranked topically unrelated website, help my website to increase the pagerank?

• Answer:

  The short answer is "Yes." However, there's no easy way for someone to really gauge how much help it is - SEO and page rank are very subjective and difficult for non-machines to quantify. The reason is because the stemming algorithms and link-popularity calculations used by major search engines are proprietary (secret). Programmers, developers, scientists, and linguists have invested countless hours into devising the best algorithms to return the most useful content to their visitors. Therefore - the best advice anyone can offer is simply this: if someone searched one of your keywords, what would your page need to have on it to be the most comprehensive, helpful, easily navigable, and frequently updated page on the web? If you think your number one search term is "bagless vacuum cleaner," you would want to provide everything anyone would possibly want to know or use about the item - history of vacuum development, reviews of different vacuums, links to major manufacturer sites, calendar of vacuum cleaner events around the country, alternative uses for vacuums, the pros and cons of bagless vs. bag vacuum cleaners... you get the idea.