I thought it was a nice read. Everyone has their own methods that work for them, with their style of site and links etc.
Personally I like to underline, bold and italicize words and phrases etc – and sure this can look spammy to search bots if it is overdone, but I think its important to find balance.. so if you are accentuating keywords/phrases like that its probably a good idea to also bold other phrases and words that aren’t your keywords, which also helps to make the page have style and personality. Without any diversification you might not survive a human review.
Sure the article is clearly not written by a guru level seo expert, that much is clear – but I think overall its good information.
The way I read and understood the “human content” bit wasn’t about the content being “human” or something weird, only a mentally challenged fool would read it that way imo – but I think they point the writer was trying to convey is that it shouldn’t be content spun on a 100% unique setting, with the keyphrase appearing 100 x in a block of 500 words that doesn’t make sense, from what I understand google does have some algorithmic triggers in regards to readability. And I think the point about that method not being viable these days is valid, those sites used to own it pretty good, now google is a bit more evolved, clearly.
Personally though I dont feel that restricting the page to 2 or 3 instances of a keyword is really needed – I have some pages with 5% or 8% keyword density that rank just fine.. but on the flip side I also have pages that rank for phrases that dont even appear on the page. I think inlinks and relevancy is really important here.
I am still, however, a firm believer that links are king, and sometimes content. Great content can make the world of difference of course, but I’ve recently seen an experiment done by a friend who ranked a page with only lorem ipsum filler text to #1 in google for a keyword with 2500+ monthly searches (exact) – just to prove a point.. the power of links over content. And that’s after panda btw.
In the end, though, google is an ever changing animal, and there will always be ways to exploit it and capitalize.