It goes without saying that an SEO is not supposed to develop site content per se, but any professional SEO person should provide info on what content and around which keywords should be be developed because this sort of decisions will directly influence the amount of traffic that a specific site gets. Let’s see what falls in the realm of the SEO content development procedure:
- menu and navigation;
- content itself;
- headings and sections.
The ideal situation would be to influence all the above-mentioned aspects while a site is being developed, but if you happen to work with an existing site you still can positively influence it’s performance in terms of SEO. Now I’ll get a bit more into details.
Menu and navigation
If you keyword (say “tea”) allows focusing other keywords (green tea, black tea, white tea, etc) into a group, it would be really sweet to create a silo (a section on your site) where you’d gather all your tea-related posts. Doing so creates so-called depth of content. And that’s a very positive sign in terms of SEO. Just make sure that you don’t put the same or similar content and just “optimize” each page for a tea-related content by stuffing it with keywords. Be sure to make the content you create of high value to the end user. You also need to always remember to include main keywords in your site’s hierarchy as high as possible. For instance if you decided to use “green tea” as one of your keywords, make sure to create a button (call it “green” tea) in your main menu that leads to a page where you have quality content on that topic (green tea). Implementing this tip into practice on your site will definitely boost that page’s ranking for your selected keyword, which is “green tea”. Another aspect to keep in mind while working with your site’s structure would be relevance. As you probably know, you get Google juice if an external site puts a link that points to your site. You need to make sure that the link is on a relevant page (green tea related in our case). You need to do that because Google and other major search engines can figure out if the link that points to your site is on a page that has something to do with green tea or not. For example, if you got a backlink pointing to your green tea page from a page that is about cars, it’s not the best fit for your site, to say the least of it. 
I’m not saying that it has no value whatsoever, but it does not do its best for sure.
Content itself
First and foremost, you need to ALWAYS create quality and unique content. Otherwise – especially after a series of Panda updates – you run the risk of jeopardizing your site or your client’s site, which is even worth because it’ll impact your reputation as an SEO.. You can be severely deindexed and “banned” by Google. And believe me, you don’t want that. Your ultimate aim should be to make the user that comes to your site happy. And you can do that by investing your time and efforts in the best content you can possibly come up with. Sure thing you also need to keep in mind the keyword that the content should be created around. All in all, SEO as such is secondary. Quality and unique content is primary. Once you’ve decided what you’re going to create your next article, post or page about (something useful for your target audience), head over to Google Keyword Tool and see if your keyword will generate enough traffic to justify the time and effort that you want to put into developing your article. Chances are that you’ve just selected the wrong keyword for your post or article. I mean your would-be post’s topic may be very popular but you may just optimize it for the wrong keyword. Again, GKT (Google Keyword Tool) allows to see what keyword you better target and create your content around. Thus you can be confident that you get the best ROI for creating your content.
Headings and sections
The ideal situation would be to create a page or post for each keyword you’d like to target but keep in mind that you add value while doing so. Not just copying and pasting before stuffing your post with highly-trafficked keywords. Another problem in this regard is that some keywords may not generate much traffic or customers to you. So, before starting writing a post around a certain keyword, just make sure that it’s worth it. It’s rather hard to say how much traffic is enough because it largely depends on your particular industry. As a rule of thumb, 200,000 searches per month would be OK for your main keyword, and about 2,000 for your long tail keywords.
In conclusion
Again, develop content that is of high quality and of value to the end user, your site’s reader. And only afterwards do your best to optimize it for better rankings in SERPs. Not the other way around, content is still king. And it looks that it’s not going to change any time soon if ever.
About the author: Kenneth von Rauch is an avid and enthusiastic web design and web development self-made person. He blogs for the webdesign company he’s with.