The #1 and pretty much the primary way you should want to generate solid, long term, paying visitors, is this.. Write content that real people want to read! Notice I didn't say search engines. I didn't say buy random links and spun articles. Have unique content that is actually written for the person visiting your website. Real people are where where the money comes from and real people share content they find useful. So throw some social media buttons up there too to encourage people to share. Additionally, artificially inflating these numbers is really a waste of time. Good content WILL get shared across the internet. Consistently repeat this and your blog, website, message forum, whatever you have will explode with traffic. Search engines will naturally pick up on it simply because of all of the back-links sharing generates. Content is king people. Always has been and always will be! The better it is, the better your site will become.
Actually you still need to emphasize a little bit of SEO to drive traffic to your so called "King Content"
Content is the king but all other seo terms are as useful as high quality content. Cause if you have a quality content but you choose the keyword wrong your quality content can't bring traffic to your site.