The easiest and most accessible quality links is high PAGE PR blog comments.

To quickly find yourself moving up the ranks just a quick tip for you :

Make sure you have google toolbar installed that shows page rank.

Go to Google blogs

Search for related blogs in your niche.

Find high page rank pages related to your niche and go and read that article.

Now simply make a comment that is related to that article whilst also leaving a link back to your site.

I've always used this method in building backlinks (with other diversed methods)

Your comment will not always be instantly accepted and published but in time the blog owner will read your comment and find it being related to the article your commenting about. This will make them accept and publish your comments and you will find yourself obtaining high page rank backlinks in your related niche.

These kind of links will improve your search engine position in no time.

The best method is Social Bookmarking and Blog commenting..

you can comment in high pr authority edu backlinks .

For building always preferred do follow sites.Article submission,blog commenting ,forum posting are the main methods for getting back links.

Do not just follow one method use them all and vary your anchor text while building links to stay safe in search engine game. Some of the link building methods that you should try out.

Article submissions
Social bookmarking sites
Directory submissions
.gov and .edu sites
Forum posting
Blog commenting
Guest posts

3 Main methods I use:

1. Blog Commenting
2. Forum Posting
3. Directory Submissions

Have decent results already. Going to try more methods soon.

In this order:
RSS Feeds
Press Releases
Directories
Web 2.0 & Articles & Commenting (I think this is becoming less important)
Bookmarks
Forums (Really skeptical of this one)
You'll also need a good but inexpensive software like Ultimate Demon. If you want a bit more horse power then SE Nuke (far more expensive)

so far all I'm seeing are spammy methods?

I have done some of these things manually and even paid for links. But in google only two (2) links show up, while other backlink checkers show a couple of hundred links. In google's webmaster tools, members ask why this is, and their only answer is google will never show all links to all websites.

For higher quality, I like article backlinks. They usually stick around awhile, and they are on pages with articles that are relevant to your own page.

try .edu and .gov banklink search site in google try

exp: site:.edu "forum" inurl:blog "comment"

Why don't you apply link building strategy? Link building refers to the process of getting external pages to link to your website or a page on your website. It is a major factor in how Google ranks Web pages.