SearchDay - Writing for Search Engines - 13 March 2003
Creating search engine friendly web pages goes far beyond tweaking codes -- it's a delicate balancing act between pleasing the search engine and the people who will ultimately read (and act) on your content.

All too often I've seen aspiring webmasters obsess over meta tags, keyword density, and the other arcana that's supposedly important for successful search engine optimization. While there's no denying that a certain amount of basic "blocking and tackling" helps improve search engine rankings, ultimately it's the quality of content that counts.

In short, content that pleases search engine users, and fulfils and information need or prompts them to purchase something, is good. Content that's highly optimized for search engine algorithms, but fails to satisfy search engine users, is virtually doomed to a fate of obscurity.…
http://searchenginewatch.com/searchday/03/sd0313-sewriting.html