Unless you have gone through an excruciating Graduate thesis process including a Ph.D. -in any field -and have tried to publish scholarly stuff- it's hard to "get" how and why content is king. Frankly, only recently has this blogger really started figuring out how and why content is king. The parallel probably has its seeds in an early paper in 1998 by Google founders Brin and Page, then Ph.D. students in computer science at Stanford.
Sooner or later every Ph.D. student gets the message – a version of which this blogger heard several years ago and here goes:
"You are merely a soldier in the scholarly army that is pursuing knowledge. You have come after many great minds – (for starters think Aristotle and Plato) – you will contribute – and move on – other greats will come and build upon what you have done and so the chain will go on…."
But your work must pass academic scrutiny – first to publish and then must resonate with your peers and they must "cite" your work. The citing is just the idea of page ranks and high quality that is at the heart of search engines' ranking logic.
The Google Scholar product is for the academic and scholarly audience and has the tag-line " Stand on the shoulders of giants." Here the ranking of any document is based on scholarly citations so try any idea in any field. The more the citations- the more influential the article and scholar. Remember there are two sets of hoops here – the first is the rigid,unforgiving and brutal academic publishing process where you need to ensure that you are adding to what the "giants" have already said! But the second is having a "hit" article that is like any other creative hit like a "hit" song or movie. Just ask the many movie makers about what it takes to produce a "hit" movie!
In exactly the same way as Google Scholar – the search engines including Google,Yahoo and Bing try to rank the non academic stuff. Remember here the first hoop of scholarly review before publication is missing so initially links and social media shares count. However,it's hard to pretend that you really like something- when you are well – only lukewarm to that content. Hence the famous "penalizing" in rank by search engines that is the bane of SEO when fake links are posted.
And the most amazing part of the content is king thinking is that appearances do not matter to search engines. A better or worse photo is not differentiated by search engines as the search engines are only trying to catalog and put a quality rank on your "authentic" text content. Okay your website should not put off a visitor so good web design helps that way. Also your pictures must have a text description otherwise the engines just try to guess from the adjacent text.
So I guess, if you want your "content to be king" you need to put out more of it , more regularly and try to help your reader answer her/his questions about your product or service-authentically. Contact StratoServe.