Note: Did you read an introduction post to this guide? Make sure you do so if not, to get the bigger picture! 🙂
First of all and the most important to note:
If you want your content to be optimised for Search Engines – write for Human Beings!
You should write for people first and search engines second. This means that you should be focused more on creating good quality content that will engage your website’s visitors. Be assured that when you do so – search engines will recognise your efforts.
The extra bonus of good quality content is that readers will share your work generating additional backlinks, not to mention extra traffic, and search engines will value your quality work because it will simply read well without too many enforced keywords all over the place!
Long gone are the times, when keyword stuffing was the way to go – overused phrases you want to rank for not only make the content hard to read for a visitor but also make it look like a spam or babbling for search engines! And they don’t like it just as much as a human reader wouldn’t!
You still want keywords in your content, but only as much as it’s needed for search engines to pick it up.
So remember – these days when you’re writing your content for humans, you are optimising it for search engines (more or less) same time! Now, more to the details: