I’m surprised to see that there are still “SEO professionals” teaching others the publish and pray method – growing a blog by doing nothing but publishing content and ignoring link building altogether. They couldn’t be more incorrect.
First of all, if you’re not link building, are you even really an SEO? There are over 200 ranking factors and link building is still the #1 determining factor. If you do nothing else and ONLY focus on links, you have a better chance at building a high-traffic blog than if you were to do everything BUT link building.
Links move rankings, not just for an individual page but for all pages across your domain. You end up ranking for more long-tail keywords as a result of your domain authority increasing.
Source: RankXL