From what I've seen PR is just what Google rates your site as. Hence Page Rank, people say it is not important, which is true, only in the sense that Page Rank isnโt updated very often and sometimes doesnโt reflect your actual search engine ranking. You have an actual page rank hidden inside Googleโs system. The visible page rank could take many months to show up if you donโt have one, or if you do, it could take many months to change. Visible page rank could be important again if Google updated it more often.
When people say PR is not very important, what that means, at least IMO is, if you have a cartoon website, and you get 100 cooking sites PR3-4 link to you. This will increase your PR. But in search engines, this will not help you as much as 20-40 kids websites, or children oriented websites that have 2-3PR and will not increase your PR as much.
Google will find keywords that your link partners link to you with, and also keywords that are on your link partners website, and use them to shape the category of your site.
So, if you are not going after the search engine rankings as much as PR then go link crazy blindly linking to everyone, this will increase your PR quicker then taking the time and finding good link partners. The ONLY reason I could think of you actually wanting to do this would be if your "childrenโs" sites didnโt want to link to you because your PR is too low, so what you would have to do is raise it with irrelevant links first, once Google updates it, drop your irrelevant link partners and go find the relevant ones that will link to you now, since you have some PR.
If you want to get a higher search engine ranking, forget about PR and find some decent relevant link exchanges. IMO 5-10 PR2-3 sites that are relevant are better then 2 PR6-7 sites that have nothing to do with you or your service/products. Research keyword search counts for your topic through a keyword suggestion tool:
http://inventory.overture.com/ Once you find some high traffic keywords that meet your service/product, use them in your anchor text and description in your link exchange.
There are obviously many more things you can do, this is the art of search engine optimization, but this should get you off your feet.
If you donโt already have a link exchange manager look into:
http://www.MyLinking.com, this will make your link exchange life easier.
-UrbelT