Ok, I confess. No content alone will make you rich unless you are J.K. Rowling or Dan Brown.
(Come to think of it even they need good marketing, too.) But both anecdotes and studies
agree: if you want traffic, you need good content. To turn traffic into sales, you need good
content. To get repeat visitors, you need fresh, good content and lots of it.

What Is Good?

But from the perspective of that all-important first step — getting the traffic — what constitutes "good?" Most spiders will read only about the first 200 words of a page before moving on. During that scan the robot picks up the basic information that the search engine algorithms later turn into a ranking decision. That means, you need to pack your punch into those all important first few paragraphs. (But you knew already that is 50% or more of marketing.) Fortunately, no advanced degree is necessary to gain the needed insight, just common sense and some experience, along with a few helpful tools.

The first sentence or two should contain keywords that reflect the message you want to plant uppermost in your visitor's mind. That makes writing keyword-rich copy an exercise in psychology.

Picking Keywords
Over 90% of searches are done with one or two keywords typed into the box. Single keyword searches make up most of that 90%, but mix it up. Use some single keyword terms in a sentence and sprinkle some double keyword phrases here and there. But which word or two is best? Think about what you would use to search for, say, an acoustic guitar. Then ask a few friends; that will give you a perspective that might not have occurred to you. (You might be odd!) Then, use a tool like Yahoo! Search Marketing's keyword selector tool and get a wider viewpoint. In short order, you'll have a list surrounding your topic that will make for potentially great spider food. But you need to turn that potential into reality. When you do your analysis, keep in mind the actual relationship between what you offer and that keyword. Just picking "guitar" or "acoustic guitar" might be too generic, it depends on exactly what you pre-sell. Are you an affiliate for an instrument merchant, or are making income directing traffic to an instructor, or offering MP3 downloads? The nature of your business will heavily influence how you refine that list of prospective keywords.

Change Them Often
Whatever your business, it isn't static and it exists in a dynamic environment. Products, the state of information about them, and every other variable online are constantly changing. Competitors rise and fall in the marketplace. Sears, at one time, was the largest retailer on the planet. Wal-Mart supplanted them long ago. Microsoft was unbeatable 10 years ago, now they're struggling to compete. That means you need to keep the keyword-rich copy you write relevant to what is happening now, not six months ago. Here again something like Wordtracker or the Yahoo! Selector will help to keep you up-to-date.

Keywords are absolutely essential to moving your copy beyond interesting into profitable. But, that doesn't mean that you should necessarily focus on keywords directly when first creating your text. Philosophers sometimes suggest that aiming straight at happiness may cause us to fall short of it. But re-directing attention to other things leads there. That indirect approach is equally appropriate in writing website content. At least during the first draft (and you should always do at least two), just focus on your topic. Convey the information that needs to be there and don't think about whether the words you choose are good spider food. Then, after you have it in good shape, do your keyword research to prepare for a final draft.