Depends on the niche.

If you want to rank for long-term keywords it's definitely possible in fact you'll always rank for
some keywords you didn't really optimized for. If one keywords brings you one visitor per month or 20 per day.. that's the question..

But if you want to rank for some main money related keyword or so.. then forget it.. It's all about links up there.

Step 1: Take everything Google tells you with a grain of salt, as it's propaganda for the most part.

In an ideal world (according to Google) you create such high quality content that you naturally rank highly and visitors will appear. In the real world, people who do this are left scratching their heads, thinking I did everything Google said so why can't I rank?

Even if you write high quality content that other webmasters like so much that they link to you, you still need to get your content out there for them to read. So in theory, yes, that does work, but you need to network with others in your niche and get them to link to. Not only for backlink purposes but also for traffic. I would go down the route of generating high quality links, personally, as first and foremost I focus on writing content that converts and not to obtain links.

Brian Dean is a beast at getting back links to his site from posting high quality content. Google "backlinko" and check him out. He describes how he does it in great detail. And yes, his method is reproducible.

It's a lot of hard work but definitely doable.

Interesting - when I entered backlinko on my iPad I saw I have this page bookmarked - Backlinks: 17 Powerful (Yet Untapped) Sources - some of the ideas are interesting like the .edu backlinks and outdated links ideas.

I hear that about Google also. A lot of shares people might get people linking on sites like facebook and twitter that aren't even do follow links so they may not help that much anyway if it isn't going viral or something.

Definitely, but only on Long Tail phrases.
Build quality content and you should see the organic traffic within 4-6 weeks, but if you build web 2.0 on wordpress.com for example you will see the traffic after couple of days. No backlinks needed. Of course backlinks will increase the traffic a lot but you can get "some" traffic only by publishing unique + readable and of course valuable content.

While content is instrumental to you ranking that does not mean article alone will do the job.

As a matter of fact, a well written unique article on a relevant topic covers almost the entire aspect of having a good content ready for publication, indexing and syndicating.

A lot more depends on the quality of the incoming links to your page than the original content itself.
Don't listen to the myth claiming a lengthy article helps you rank, ofcourse, except if the term is close to zero competition.

Come on man, you're killing me with the sewage

I say it does, but you need more. Google onsite factors count much more than it use to. Before maybe 10% of the ranking was onsite factors, but estimates are as high as 30% onsite factors now. But you'll always need backlinks.

Quality content alone won't raise you in the ranks. Having quality content, enough that visitors find your content better than any other site they look at, can raise your ranks, but only if those visitors have high pr websites of their own, and link out to you from their websites. Or possibly the amount of unique visitors/traffic visiting your site on a consistent basis.

Imagine that, if all being equal, set up 2 brand new websites. On one put a few sentences about the subject. On site 2 put the utmost quality content you can write or buy. Guess what? They both start at PR0. Not one ounce of one being quality over the other will increase that on it's own.

Might Google rank one over the other if one contains more content? More (or less) keywords? Images and videos? Certainly some of these things are written in the algorithm. To what percentage each factors in, who knows. What we do know, however, that the number one ranking factor is, and always will be, incoming links, and the strength and quantity of those links.