Quality do follow back links and numbers of traffic is beneficial for your ranking and traffic,

The best way to improve the website rank - ON page and OFF page.

Create good content in daily basis and put link to your site with your keywords, do off page seo of it share it in different popular social networking sites, social bookmark, ping your url and after all do link building you will get a good ranking.

Improve ranking through forums you can expect more link juice.

Publish Relevant, Authoritative Content.
Update Your Content Regularly.
Metadata.
Have a link-worthy site.
Use alt tags.

We need to keep fresh and unique content on the website. This is the one kind of way we will be able to reach the top of the SERP on Google.