.edu and .gov links are gold. But, quality links are generally those that are from websites that are more or less authorities in the niche you're trying to scale. What I'd suggest you do is snag yourself a copy of Market Samurai, query it for your target keyword, then look at the top 10 sites for the keyword. After doing this, look at where they're getting their backlinks from (you can even scrape the entire list) and try to snag the same links they've got. If your on-site SEO is better than theirs, you can easily jump above in the SERPs with the same exact links going to your site and theirs. But, if you have links from all 10 of the sites currently ranking for your target keyword, you'll be in far better shape than them. Once you've done that, start looking for other authority sites in your niche and do whatever you can to snag links from them. If you do that, you'll be in good shape.
