Let's say that you have a website and you want to promote it. It does not really matter if it is an e-commerce website, a personal or a company site or a forum where people can chat or provide information or answer questions. Their promotion is similar enough in order to care about three major things: traffic, content and backlinks.
Everyone wants traffic, to be read, watched, admired and to know that people are talking about him or her. Right?
Ok, for this to happen you must to have content of some kind. The search engines consider the most important the text, probably because is the easiest to create (you just need a device and a keyboard - and it does not matter if your are writing from a computer, a smart phone or a tablet)... if you are drawn to write you can always find a way to do it. Some people just love to write (and you should use something like this if you don't have the time or the passion for writing), others can hardly put two words together and make three mistakes in the process.
This is one of the reasons the unique content is most valued: is has to be created, not stolen. The Google algorithm evolved in this logical direction: to value new and unique content and to ignore duplicates.
The other ways to create content is with pictures and movies. The mobile devices are very easy to get these days, and images and movies are just one click away.
One common SEO method used in the last years was creating backlinks to the targeted sites. The popularity of one website over the internet was considered to be rather important (at least for the search engines), but it's not such important now. It's rather logic why: with one click you can put *(using script or software) your website's URL in several thousands different places. The Google algorithms got clever from this point of view: you have to put different URLs from your website to keep your pagerank and popularity high.
But from one point of view create backlinks to your websites still remains important: if you have a new website that no one knows about you have to let people know about it. You also want to announce the entire world about the increasing content of your site with the backlinks from other websites. So the content and backlinks will give you traffic.
Let's say you hire a team of men and women to write quality unique content for your website and to promote it using backlinks on other sites and social media. But no matter your resources, they are rather limited: a given number of people working 8-10 hours a day, every day, will have a result that can be measured. Change the number of people, the number of hours and their tools and you have a (hopefully) better result. That can also be measured.
That's where the traffic comes to boost your result. The quality of your content will bring other people (a greater number every day) that will like and share your stories, images and movies, creating other backlinks and calling other people to visit your website. Just like waves.
So, actually there is no such thing as traffic versus content versus backlinks in SEO. You have to consider them together in order to have great results.
