My view of the world

I’ve got a couple of websites that I’d like to get higher page rank on ( imagine that), the trouble is that Google is the number one search engine and they change the way they rank pages almost every 3 months.
I’ve made a deal with a friend who has at least one page rank 6 and effective control of a couple more. If we can get my sites up to a page rank 5 or better this will help him which in turn will help us.
Google has some rules about reciprocal links and the number of back links and which text they read on your page.
As I understand it, they don’t like a one for one link exchange, so the first site should link to the links page of the second site while the second site links to the main page of the first site.
The spiders seem to only index the first hundred or so words on a page.
You need a link back to your main page from every other page in your site, you also need the proper “alt” text on images.
ad infintum.
This whole thing is a major P.I.T.A.