Just focus on content. If content is so good then people will automatically link to your site. Without backlinks PR is not possible.
If you wants to gain some good PR then you have to put focused on quality link building, you should have high PR Quality links with related (niche) sites and you should have to remember it's should have less number of out bond links (below 35 links) which will help you gain some good PR.
I suggest you to consider about. # internal links of your site # use proper and easy navigation's # unique and quality content
Pagerank is decided by the number of quality backlinks. You can not ignore it, you'll have to try all the ways through which you will be able to fetch backlinks for your website. ATB
If you ignore the link building, it is hard to get good PR. However, you cn focusing on quality content, if someone think it is good and put them into their site with the link, then it will helps to improve your PR
Now I'm confused...aren't backlinks still links? Can somebody give me 3 examples of backlinks and regular links that could help PR?
If it's a blog, then regular content updates - if possible daily updates. Follow the webmaster guidelines (http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769) and as the others have said, focus on quality content. Other than that, you need to concentrate on acquiring links from authoritative sites in your niche, and this can take time.
Jack, you will get the same answer over and over again.. Google PageRank is mostly about Backlinks, so maybe you should first try to use the search function before posting and properly should focus on your site ranking in the SERP's Build your website for your visitors by focusing more on what is really important for them, and SERP's / PR will simply follow
Backlinks = Other sites linking to your site without the "nofollow" attribute (or using javascript to prevent PR from passing). Other sites linking to your site are 100% responsible for your toolbar PR. Without other sites linking to yours, you cannot have toolbar PR of 1 or greater.
If you have a good quality site with useful content that people know about then other sites should eventually link to your site. And you would potentially gain sort of natural backlinks. Most likely you will get nowhere near as much as if you did your own backlinking. Unless you had a very popular unique site. Not sure why you don't want to do backlinking, because of time and effort or you just don't want to. You could also try to get your link on a page with a high pr that is do follow, and very few other links on the page so it would throw you a lot of juice towards your own pr.
Page rank is calculated based on one of the important factors and that's the number of quality of back links that you are getting. In order to do that, engaging on the techniques such as blog commenting, article submissions, classified ads, press release, forum posting, link exchange, online groups and social bookmarking helps. Quality deals with relevancy. Get back links on relevant and DoFollow sites. Google gives more value on them.