I run a site whose PageRank seems to have all but disappeared. When building it there was not much thought given to SEO, so there is much room for improvement I feel. Does anyone have a basic checklist of things that a site REALLY ought to have in order to achieve a reasonable ranking?

At the moment gaining page rank is predominatently about backlinks, backlinks, and more backlinks. The higher the referring pages rank is the better, and also the more relevant their site is to your content comes into play too. It is also of benefit if the link is one-way as google sees all these links as "votes" for your site. For that reason reciprocal linking has less of an impact on your page rank as google assume, to a degree, that these have been traded. This doesn't mean reciprocal linking is a waste of time but these type of links are less important and carry less weight than true one-way links coming from sights who see yours as an authority on a subject or a useful pool of information for their visitors to view.

Agreed with padawan, there is no way to be gaurenteed pagerank. If you put a considerable amount of time into link building you should be good.

I recommend that you go to a Barnes and Noble. Spend a buck for a cup of coffee and pick up the book '101 Ways to Promote your Website' by Susan Sweeney.

Not much of a book but she has a good list in Appendix C that is worth reading and taking notes about.

It also has some good website design ideas to make your website search engine friendly and on search engine directory submissions.

Who knows, maybe you'll buy the book but if not the coffee will be good....

You can also check out our article list at www.auxic.com/fa.htm. It has a number of articles about Meta tags, how to use Meta tags, etc. Hope it helps.

You can check your google page rank and some other statistics from http://www.checkmypr.com

Regards..

Page rank is a pretty useless benchmark to target alone. It's mostly a means by which Google calculates external link weight and internal link-weight distribution. Your homepage can possibly have a rank of 7 and never feature in google search results. In this case it would be a matter of your domain being sandboxed or it could also be a matter of your page not being optimised for any particular search term.

Being firstly concerned with PR is non-sequitur. Be aware of the terms that define the relevancy your page content first. Try a little search engine optimization, then get stuck into backlinks.

From your point of view, other site's page rank are more important than your own. By persuing links with high PR pages relentlessly, your own PR will follow suit. However persuing backlinks for the sole purpose of upping your own PR is nothing short of an ego trip. The real returns of more qualified visitors to your site is largely determined by your targeted SEO key terms and SERPs. It's only at this stage that will PR play a significant role in SERPs and attracting targeted traffic.