BTW a high proportion of open forums links are 'no-follow'.
You just need to find the ones that arent, also blogs that arent, post a comment, leave your web link in the comment and so long as the blog is open, even has a reasonable page rank is even better, then bobs your uncle!
Im with statcounter too. Google analytics is IMO overly complicated, theres no need at all for 80% of the figures they offer. Like I said Google can count and when it does it cant stop
it spews out the most ridiculously unecessary figures, computations and analysis going
As for quality links, generally theyre viewed as what is needed, but you can be #1 on googles first page with NO links to your site without paying a penny