One of the most important factors in getting good placement for your website in keyword searches is to make it easy for the search engine robots to discover your site's purpose. The content (text) on your webpage is weighted heavily in determining what the robots will report about what your site should be indexed for, especially the first sentence or paragraph on the page.
Let's take a simplistic, imaginary situation where ABC Company manufactures widgets made from stainless steel that are critical parts for a certain type of industrial roller. Although there are many types of "widgets," the typical ABC Company customer is looking specifically for stainless steel widgets. Frequently the person writing the page text will want to lead off the website content with something that is so general that robots can't glean meaningful information from it. Like this:
"Our company prides itself on setting the highest standards in the industry for our top quality parts for rollers."
What is a robot going to report about this text? Probably the most useful phrase is "parts for rollers," but this doesn't help the company in it's quest for high ranking for the searches mentioned above. However, if the first sentence is:
"Stainless steel widgets manufactured by ABC Company are precision engineered for use in gizmo rollers."
Then the sentence contains the type of widget, the company name and the type of roller, all of which may be helpful in being found for searches on these terms.
In our imaginary example, this sentence is just the tip of the iceberg in trying to get good placement for keyword rich content. The keywords typically need to be used several times in grammatically correct, contextually accurate following sentences without "stuffing" the keyword on the page (which is a definite no-no). This creates a keyword density on the page that is helpful to robots in condensing your text down to the most meaningful aspect of your web page.
To illustrate the fact that this example is an over-simplification, here is what Google says about it's methodology;
"Today we use more than 200 signals, including PageRank, to order websites, and we update these algorithms on a weekly basis.”
But writing good, keyword-rich content is without question one of the most important and valid ways to let the search engines know what your site is about. Getting that message across is the first key step to getting good placement for your desired keywords.
