I've observed several sites ranking good but usually have very little content on their homepage but just a good design with several buttons or links. Since usage of keywords and content on the homepage matters a lot for better SEO, how's that possible?
Have you seen the home page of Google ,and do you know its page rank . You cannot decide the rank only on basis of content and keywords ,one of the most important factor is the website's usability . Take example of Amazon ,When you think about online shopping,your mind will say go to amazon,right . The popularity depends on many factors ,Many Government and Educational institute websites does not need SEO because people already coming to them because of their functional importance.
Keywords on the pages matter, but you can use meta to substitute it. I actually have a few very content-sensitive clients that don't allow me to put anything on the pages. And it's not hard to get first places. Google understands
Google can recognize text just by looking at it, if the translator of Android can.. but you should always view the HTML source to see if there is hidden content. Google has gone a long way ranking according to the quality of the content, in other aspects like adwords, I believe Google has made poor choices.
I am also aware of a few websites which have almost no content a few images and a few lines of text along with flash design, less than 10 links, almost no text in the source(less than 50 words) and the websites are less than 2 years old. And those rank better than older websites with good quality and rich content,seo optimized(but not over) with age of over 6 years old and 100s of natural links from very reputable websites,etc. Sometimes it seems a few people at Google just manually change the order the way they feel,because at times it doesn't make any sense!!
I would like to inform you that this time we can say content is the king in the internet marketing because Google is very stick about duplicate content and make a storage rules such as Google panda.
May be these sites are getting some inbound links from high PR sites and a lot of other links from many different sites. Also, people might be linking to their internal pages, and not just homepage.
You cannot rank website with no content because Google lists the website content as a primary ranking factor.
This means they have very very SEO Optimizations. Older the websites higher the search rankkings. I recommend you to optimize images for SEO
What they do is, post very little but quality content and market it on the web, people like it because it's unique, fresh and quality content. As a result, their ranking improves with that little content. With time, if they keep up their strategy, they'll be really famous.
that's a good point. the users interactions with the site must be what boosts it's rankings. I've heard of Google boosting rankings of sites that have a lot of traffic and good use interaction.
What I guess that your overall site should have valuable or interesting contents (to increase visitors engagement) but it doesn't mean the homepage too need to be content rich.
You can rank on SERP without having content if you have quality backlinks from relevant sites. The sites without content would have done on page effectively for their web pages.