You don't really need alot of backlinks to rank with 200 articles. If you drip feed them and do a solid backlink a day, you'll get a ton of long tail traffic you can monetize. Then eventually as you build more links and drip feed more articles you'll start ranking for hard keywords.
I remember ranking a website with just content. I didn't use any backlinks, but we were just posting short 200 word articles (about 2-3) a day.
The thing about whitehat SEO is it's more about on page optimization than offpage. Offpage is super simple where you can just do guest posting and you don't have to worry about building any more links. The social media links, etc. will come eventually from the guest posts.
On-page SEO optimization
- page speed optimization
- content optimization - using proper headers/titles, having a low keyword density (you shouldn't worry about keyword density. If you write the article by hand/spin it manually you shouldn't have to worry). Checking the entire site for duplicate headers/words/etc. proper image tags.
- general website optimization - checking for dead links. Checking google webmasters and fixing dead pages/redirects.
etc...
For big websites, I personally built scripts to spider the entire site and check for on-page stuff like this.
Off-page SEO:
I used Gscraper to find guest post locations and I sent out emails to the owners for a guest post/article mention. I tried using GSA, but it never showed any positive effects on boosting the guest posts. It was wasted resources.
There's alot more on-page optimization that affects your SEO rankings and for the site you shouldn't worry about offpage as much because you'll have alot of content for Google to index.
