Improving your credit score

[bjl584]

Pay all your bills on time
Keep credit utilization to under 30%
Monitor and dispute errors on your credit reports
Don't open too many new accounts in a short time period

[myrdale]

Short and sweet!

If you do want to play with snakes, consider requesting an increase to your credit limit with each of your lenders.

A card that initially had a $1,000 limit could within a year be increased to $10,000 in many cases. How much of an increase they will approve will depend on many factors (primarily your income, your probably not going to go above 50% for any one card).

Once your limit is increased though, keeping your spending the same, your utilization ratio goes way down. $100 on $1,000 vs $100 on $10,000. The key here is not to use this as an excuse to actually spend / borrow more money.

I think paying your bill on time is going to be the most important factor.

It's not clear to me how inactivity on a card affects you. Making purchases and paying in full for 12 months is probably going to have a better effect than making no purchases / payments at all over that time period.