This is a very general question: How exactly does Google determine the desirability of the content of a website to users (and therefore rank websites), given some search keywords? I kept seeing people saying that you should make you website great as the long-term strategy for SEO. But how exactly does Google know how great the content of a website is? If the important factor is the website being mentioned in many other quality websites, would the best strategy be to post the link of the website on as many quality websites as possible? If the number of visits by users given searching certain keywords is a factor, then wouldn't it further polarize the already popular and not-so-popular websites? Other than these two, I cannot come up with other ways that explain how Google's algorithm may work right now.
I am really stuck on this issue. My website is for people to live stream their working and find work buddies, and there is little textual content on the website that is explicitly related to things like "study buddies." There are just user profiles on the website, and I do not want to add explicit content on the website. I cannot find my website page after page even my search keywords perfectly matched the content of the html meta description tag. I used to post the link on many subreddits but it was super inefficient in attracting the traffic to the site compared to having a high ranking on Google. Looking forward to any help!
