There are many various opinions on page ranking. 

For those who are new to the question, Matt Cutts works at Google and he runs a great blog.

He is considered the guy to go to for answers on these kind of questions. 

Click here to read Matt Cutts post on page ranking and Google.

I heard Matt Cutts speak this year at WordCamp San Francisco and the one thing he always places emphasizes on is, good content and a correctly set up website is the most important thing. He says don't get too crazed with your page ranking.

Matt Cutts blog is a very straightforward place to educate yourself on basic SEO and how Google works.

Take some time to read the comments (which are recent, and right up to 2009) and be sure to take a look around at the other information he has on his blog. 

I always tell my clients that page rank is just one indicator that you are doing things correctly. It also takes some time to get ranked.

If you have had your website for years and you are a 0 or a 1 or 2, that tells me you have not been set up correctly or you are not doing the things that will help you in the page rankings.

Many old flash based websites have a zero ranking since search engines do read flash files, (though recently webmasters know to use html pages to add meta tags and keywords for the flash files and google recently started indexing some flash files) but in general old flash sites have no keywords and little meta tags and have done terrible in search engines.

There can be many reasons why your website is not ranking over a 2 with google.

What are the things I need to do to get my website ranked better in the page rankings? 

I myself read SEO TRAINING blog, which I have learned so much from.

The guy who runs it is amazing generous with the free information he gives you and I love him because he is real and no nonsense, no hype and rock solid.
This website is the place to get started educating yourself on how to properly set up your site for good page ranking.