Questions About Blogging

I recently became a member of SeededBuzz, a website that specifically caters to promoting blogs through increasing traffic, popularity, and interaction between bloggers in general.  Since the first step is Planting a Seed - or rather, writing a blog post and inviting other SeededBuzz members to write their own posts on this topic and then link up to you, I thought I'd write a post of questions.  Questions about blogging.

At the risk of sounding too green to call myself a blogger, I have a few questions that I would love to ask those of you who are more experienced in the world of blogging.  Granted, my blog is something like a life journal.  My posts generally fall into one of the following categories: motherhood, education, fitness, writing, and art.  I've been at it for at least seven years (on various blogs), but have only just recently made it my goal to become a dedicated blogger.  Subsequently, I know very little about the ins and outs of blogging.  Whereas I don't see myself becoming a professional blogger, I have heard of several opportunities to make good money writing posts and would love to try my hand at this.  And I'm not just talking about putting up ads (although I've got to say, those Amazon Contextual Ads are incredibly useful when writing a post because you can link up to just about any product you want to discuss).  

One website in particular said they would only pay for posts that are published on blogs that have a Google Page Rank of 4 and above (regardless of whether the blog is your own or you are guest posting).  So I did a little research:

Wikipedia says that Google Page Rank was designed by Google for "the purpose of 'measuring' [the] relative importance" of each web page through "considering more than 500 million variables and 2 billion terms."  Setting aside the obvious humor in Google rating their own pages based on a scale of 1 to 10 (are we in middle school?) - I must say I'm a big flabbergasted by the number of variables being considered here.  

None the wiser, I was redirected to The Google PageRank Checker, where I discovered that my blog falls into the category of N/A - "it is not possible to show any page rank now."  The possible reasons given were as follows: 

(1) The web page is new, and it is not indexed by Google yet.

(2) The web page is indexed by Google, but it is not ranked yet.

(3) The web page was indexed by Google long ago, but it is recognized as supplemental.

(4) The web page or the whole website is banned by Google.

My web page is relatively new in the grand scheme of things, but I've had it for almost three years now.  Since I decided to become a more dedicated blogger, I've been posting anywhere from two to six times a week.  I have no logical reason to assume my blog has been banned, so that leaves me with two possibilities here: I'm just not ranked yet, or I'm supplemental.

So I started reading Jim Boykin's blog about why web pages are considered supplemental.  Boykin says that there are three main reasons: the blog has duplicate content, no content, or is an orphaned web page (he defines this as "a page no one links to, including yourself").

Which brings me to my list of questions:

1.  What are the main variables considered when ranking a web page? 

2.  How can I make my blog meet all the main requirements to obtain a high page ranking?

3.  How often does Google actually rank indexed pages?

4.  Can you tell me anything about linking up with other pages to avoid being considered an "orphan"? 

5.  Also, do you have any recommendations regarding networking?  Anything goes here - I'd love to hear about your favorite blog networks, blog listings, blog advice and tips, etc. 

Please help!