Fast White Hat SEO Techniques to get High Search Engine PR Ranking?

As the title says, what are fast ways to get a high ranking in the search engine results from high PR/high traffic sites?

The Panda and Penguin update from google pretty much narrowed down and kicked out every single website that cheated using crappy quality content, backlinks, etc. So many webmasters and companies are intimidated by the update....not sure why. The only thing the update is doing is emphasizing on why it's so important to make sure your website should have high quality content for the user experience.

I know the typical methods that people use:

- Promote your website on facebook, tumblr, pinterest, and other social media networks
- Submit your site to relevant high PR social bookmarking do-follow sites (in my opinion, submitting your site to thousands of social bookmarking sites that have no relevancy to your website is a waste of time)
- Post your website on relevant high traffic forums to generate organic backlinks and traffic
- SEO optimize your website using strong keywords, tags, headers, URLs, etc.
- Email people who can do link exchanges with you

I focus more on quality than quantity. So my question is....is there a specific method that people use to get a high rank in their niche use WH methods in a short period of time? I've seen websites get a high ranking after many many months and years of pushing out high quality content and gaining organic traffic but I don't have months or years. I only have days.