Great post on Page Rank... it certainly is not the most important thing. Seems to be more of an ego thing...haha!
As for position in the SERPS (search engine result pages), Google takes into account over 200 factors when deciding where your web page will rank. (remember, Google ranks pages, not sites).
Curious as to what those 200 things are? So was I... then I found this:
(hope links/urls are ok... not an aff link and not my site)
http://www.vaughns-1-pagers.com/inte...ng-factors.htm