Real traffic. If your site has real good traffic then google will give a good PR to your site. Don't worry
Easiest way of getting high PR is getting dofollow backlinks from high PR authority sites. Even a single quality backlink can give you good PR.
You need to constantly update your website with very useful content, also use social network sites to improve you visitors. The only problem is you can never be told how many days or weeks or month it will take. So you just have to keep working hard and your hard work will pay off but you have to be patient.
do follow back links from high page rank sites. you know each dofollow back link for your site is a vote , to get the high page rank your vote's quality should be high .
I think the key is to write good quality content, which is none spammy (eg without anchor links throughout, keep these to a minimum to keep people engaged in your content so that they return). Also, share your blogs through facebook, twitter, and google +, this will drive more traffic to your blog, and we all know that google loves website which are popular. Make sure you don't just copy blogs from ezine articles, your posts need to be unique, google is very clever and understands duplicate content, even if you have re-written it!
agreed wtih you Drain Clear UK. you mentioned just 2 things in your post 1-Quality content (unique). 2-Quality back links. just these items are required to increase page rank.
Try to get:- Links from some quality sites (which have High PR, High DA). Publish good unique contents regularly.
atsad makes an important point - high DA - Don't base everything on PR, as Google has not updated PR since early this year. Uses other sources like Moz.com (DA=domain authority)
Yeah, I agree with some of the folks above. Get high PR websites linking to your website and making a relevant post would definitely help.
Getting backlinks from authority sites from all corners of the world and social shares matter most to get your site's PR. How popular is your blog is the only thing you should consider. I always try to get backlinks from different International Authority sites with different anchor text using different IPs, it always works for me.