SEO is about the content. Nobody will find your website for desire keywords if there are no such keywords on your website. However, Google search algorithm is smarter than we think. Content created for SEO purpose doesn’t have to contain exact phrases we want to advertize our website for.
Let’s say, we do SEO for a website about places with healthy food in New York City. Our main keyword is “Healthy Food NYC.” It doesn’t mean, we have to write a content and implement into this text as many times as possible an exact phrase “Healthy Food NYC.” Created in such a way text doesn’t sounds good and it doesn’t look natural for Google.
So, let’s search in Google for “healthy food nyc.” Search engine makes bold words and phrases which match our query. If you will take a closer look into results you can discover, Google makes bold keywords such as: New York, Health Food, NY, New York’s food. As we can see, Google knows grammar and it can easily determine a subject of a sentence.
Let’s see an another example, and let’s search for “php developer.” In results we can see in bold keywords like developers and PHP development.
Conclusion: content created for SEO purpose has to have a natural look and feel. There is no need to repeat over and over in every sentence an exact phrase we want to advertize our website for. By using synonyms and different forms of desire keywords, our text will look friendly for visitors and natural for search engine, it will earn a value from SEO perspective.