link building ppc and many other marketing techniques i think there are more then 70 ways to promote your website
SEO articles in not the perfect way to get traffic. It's mainly done for PR and indexing purposes. Of course the more the indexed pages, the more will be the traffic! But still you can surely get traffic without specially writing SEO articles.
we have lot of techniques to gain links, articles also help you to get traffic but we have lot of other techniques
Forums posting and participation in online communities is also helpful for generating healthy traffic to the website. Cool Regards, Faiz Khan