Wikipedia never focus on SEO, they just go for the basic on-page SEO. Basically they are focusing on the content itself. Yes, wikipedia is one of the website that have tons of quality backlink, but it is not through the link building, most of the links are natural links, natural backlink is due to the quality content
IMO.....both content and links is the king..... content is for your products conversion rates.... links is for traffic.....
It depending from destination of your service. For example from earlier, on dating websites no content, there more important other things. Many other services in network also not need good content to have a lot of visitors. Anyway without good content they are high ranking in Google, because Google at major valuable keywords editing results by manually. They can't allow that some rubbish website can be at top, because then will lose good look. I saw many times special prepared websites with good content, which very quickly been at top, but also very quickly goes down. So...
I guess my point was that saying Content is KING is like saying the the sky is blue, which in fact today it was grey tonight its black yesterday is was red in the morning.
You've got to have both. Good content Good quality of content Good SEO. SEO is important in the short term, need people to visit your site and seo is best way to do that. In the long term, content is king. I can rank a site to the top 10 for almost any keyword within 6 months, I know the secrets. You need to take your time though, if you do your seo too fast, you will get penalty. With that being said, take your time on seo and in the mean time work on content. No reason to not have both.
It is common to have some sound bites that works for a while, but since the Internet is a constantly dynamic medium, it shouldn't come as a surprise when content alone can no longer make it, you need traffic too
Content is king, but you need to push yourself to authority status in your niche first before anything.
Content is crucial for long-term profit, that's why writing articles to article directory has its benefit