Page Rank in Google?

As you all may know by this time ,it is not easy to get a high pagerank in google .I have used a payed article submitter service but it seems to me that it is going to be much quicker to just register per hand and only submit to the article directories that do have a high page rank.On the other hand submitting to low page rank article directories give you a back link. I wonder if anyone can shed a bit of light on how to get a good placement on MSN and Yahoo?