There is a lie that is told by search engine professionals and I'm sure you've heard it before. They say it over and over again - just hoping to make it true. The lie is that content is king and it's goes a little something like this: If you build great content your website will magically find its way to page one of the search engines. People will read find your article and link to it. There will be world peace.
Now in the perfect world this would be true and content would indeed be king. Websites would be ranked based mostly on relevance but unfortunately it's not the case. While creating great content should be considered necessary, content is at best queen.
The real king of course is backlinks. Search engines love things that are trendy and popular. They count links to your site like votes. If other trusted web sites are linking to you, your content must be great and relevant, the more sites linking to you the better. Like it or not, backlinks will do more for your search engine ranking then great content.
Creating great content may help you to get backlinks. Bloggers and website owners may see your great content and decide they want to link to it from your site. But generally creating great content is not enough. You've got to advertise your website and get it noticed by the search engines by creating backlinks.
Not all backlinks are created equally. There are dofollow and nofollow backlinks. There are backlinks with anchor text or no anchor text. There are high page rank and low page rank backlinks. There are backlinks from relevant sites and those from not so relevant sites. A strong backlink profile will have links from various sources, various types of sites, with various anchor text.
If you ever created great content only to find yourself buried by spammy, subpar sites then you will already know what I am saying is true: content is not king. If you need more proof do a search for a popular buyer's term and watch all the poor quality sites that rank on the first couple of pages. Next check out there backlinks profile. You will see. backlinks are king.
So while I'll always advocate for the creation of great and unique content, if you want to get your site to the top of the search engines you need to build a strong backlinks profile. There are many ways of doing this: article submissions, social bookmarking, guest blogging, giving advice on forums, etc. Building high quality links to your great content is a recipe for success.
I have a dream, that one day my website will not be judged by the contents of it backlink profile but by the quality of its content. But until that day, backlinks are king.