There are two things that always seem to get tossed around in a conversation about SEO, content and keywords. There are more than just two, but those two probably show up in most of those conversations. A lot of times there is a struggle for content and to keep the ideas fresh, especially the longer you stare at it. One way to help lift that block are stories. Brad Geddes wrote a really good post at Search Engine Land called “Strike Keyword Gold By Writing A Simple Story“. He explains his method on how to target both high-level keywords as well as the longer tail keywords that sometimes can be hard to work into a site. Brad breaks down keywords into 4 types:

Explicit keywords: Directly describe a product
Problems keywords: Describes the conditions a product solves
Symptoms keywords: Describes a problem
Product names and part numbers: An actual product name and/or part number

Here are his examples on how to apply these keywords and drill down into the longer tail phrases:

This is a really great way to produce valuable and quality content. People go to the internet to find solutions to their problems and if you can describe the problem and solution(s) in detail, you can try to get that visitor to convert or use this content to support other pages on your site. eHow.com does this really well with a step by step guide to things. Here is an example of one of their more recent How To Guides on How to Conduct a Passover Seder. On this guide, they even have the things you’ll need to perform whats on the guide as well as tips and warnings that add that extra value to the end.