You need content that is fresh, unique, and original, but for the purposes of SEO, it also needs to have a certain amount of optimization. In the past, stuffing your content with the keywords that you were targeting seemed to do the trick. As soon as Google took over the show, however, that all changed. In their quest to provide the most relevant search results possible, Google has effectively revamped the way that websites need to be optimized.
There are many factors that will influence your search engine rankings: content, incoming links, conceived relevance towards the keyword that you are targeting, popularity, and age are all major ones. Other minor factors include META descriptions, titles, and a few other forms of on-site optimization.

Why Your Content is Important

Search engines will crawl your websites and scan the content for various keywords and phrases. Having content that has been optimized to have a 3%-5% keyword density tends to rank the best when compared to content that is overstuffed (10%+) or not optimized at all (0%-1%). It tells the search engines what your website is about and where they should index it.

When you are writing your content, focus on proper spelling and grammar, and ensure that you have placed emphasis on the keywords that you are targeting. There is reason to believe that major search engines, such as Yahoo! or Google, are utilizing various forms of a technology called “Latent Semantic Indexing”, which means that your website will also be considered relevant for supporting keywords.

For example:
If you write 500 words on “strapless sandals”, your content may also be considered relevant for related terms, such as “sandals”, “shoes”, etc.

Content is king when it comes to search engine optimization, so constantly refresh your website with new, fresh content. The search engines will recognize the increasing relevance of your website, and your search engine rankings will improve.

However, content is only one aspect of your overall SEO strategy, so don’t neglect to continue to work to increase your rankings through link building, on-site optimization, and authority building.