Create quality content. They will bring in the "best" links. Are they harder to get? Yes. Are they better in the long run? Yes.
Make great content that people will find interesting and will link to from other sources. These will much better than building them, as if links come naturally you will find they will be form high relevant sources so google will value these more.
I'd say try link exchanging or comment-linking. Those are the best ways in my experience for building good backlinks. You can also try buying links, but this can get expensive. It's the fastest method though.
create a free blog and update one content/week, and than give one way link to your blog that you will develop. I think that is the easy way to build a position in search engine or even PR
Having quality content together with creating quality of inbound link (social bookmarking, article marketing, blog commenting) helps.