Every site continues to grow on an ongoing basis, increasing the amount of content and pages available to (human) users and search engine robots alike.

For optimization-minded professionals though, a question comes immediately to mind when considering how to add content, where to add it into, and most importantly - what to have in mind while writing.

As discussed on Webmasterworld.com recently, the best rule of thumb is to generate the content first, and then think of optimizing it once it has been completed.

Hearing Both Sides...
While many can argue either side of this case, I (personally) agree with the offered advice - that content creation cannot be affected by optimization.

While this seems like a simple enough process, often times it is not. If you are responsible in tending to multiple tasks relating to your web site, you may need to evaluate your style of content creation.

Writing an article, service description, or even sales copy is difficult enough. Knowing that you should factor in keyword phrases though, adds in an element of nervousness otherwise unknown. It is the existence of this (the knowledge that you need to be conscience of your copy's affect on the engines), that creates issues for the copy you are creating.

Those issues could be a lack of style or character, a loss of progression - or worse, completely losing sense of the topic at hand.

While it is important to note the many advantages of this process, truth is this... It is counter-productive if you write something, then send it off for review, then get it online, only to optimize it later.

It can however, be a good process to help you break the trend of writing for keywords rather than writing for a purpose.

Thankfully, many search engines are putting additional emphasis on the way things are linked to and from as well as how they are structured - more so than the actual keyword popularity and density. If you tend to think otherwise, start to dissect the top 10 results on Google for any half-popular keyword phrase. You'll find sites with 30% or more keyword density, and sites with less than 5% density right there alongside one another.

Conclusion...
Whether you are writing the typical "about us" statement, a FAQ, or the latest article of a resource library - write for the reading audience and make sure your copy makes sense.

If you find yourself throwing keyword phrases together still, have another person review it for you (preferably, someone who doesn't know about SEO!). Beyond that, just make sure that your copy is well written and accomplishes what it was intended to do.

Once you've got that copy up and online, in the typical location for it - then optimize it. Work on the page's headings, the linking structure, and think of things like ALT tags, anchors, and other on-page helpers. Just don't let your optimization-minded intentions bleed through to the end user.