To my knowledge there are two ways to bring up your pagerank. One way is to have your links on high PR web page and to have their pagerank transferred over to your website. While your pagerank increases, it doesn't necessarily help out your SERPS since you could have a PR 5 simply by having 2 or 3 links on some high PR pages.. The other way to bring up your pagerank is to have a ton of backlinks from lower PR pages. The more backlinks you have the more your PR will naturally go up. Increasing your pagerank in this way will help out your SERPS and gives a more honest ranking of your web page. Is this correct or am I way off?
You want more PageRank? Get more links. You want that PageRank to be worth more? Make sure those incoming links are from pages that are relevant and related to yours. You want those incoming links to increase your rankings? Make sure the anchor text uses the search terms you want to rank well for. It's that easy. And yes, I prefer quality over quantity. But I will accept masses of links as long as they're related to what I'm hoping to rank well for and if those sites happen to have a certain quality to them as well (such as a new content site with a PR of 1 or 2 that provides information on my site's topic and has the potential to become a 4 or 5 in the next PR update).