This tactic eill work only on websites of small niches or to target the keywords on tha main pge of your website and then optimize according to this instruction. All you described here is a necessary but not sufficient requirements to make your website rank. Of course, without links you can not increase rankings of your website. The other case when these links were made not by you, but by the owners of kther websites that desided to share your content. In the case if you will target your keywords on the main page and subsections with long articles nore than 2000 words with pictures and alts, titles, and then you will set some links on news websites or websites woth high trust, it will work.