Being so long in SEO industry one word of advice that I give to all people is content is the king for in-page optimization. However always the dillemma is presentation of content.
Indeed an image is worth 1000 words. But when it comes to SEO, a single written word is better than million images. But if you start building the site keeping SEO exclusive in mind, the site may end up looking ugly with content written in different font, headings and colors. No images, no HTML tags and obviously no flash. This will indeed brings in the visitors, but given first chance they wil lrun over from your site never to return back.
So a tough question is how much is too much.
My take to this egg and hen issue is there is no concrete guideline. Sure, you have to put in content, but presentation of content along with image totally depend upon your industry and your target audience. I will illustrate two examples.
A) Building a site for a corporate client - You are a corporate. In this case your site may not really need / get as many vistors as a Britney Spears Wall Paper site may get. Also in this case, the most important thing is prsentation. You want your clients to visit your site, get an excellent impression about your company and do visit your site again and again whenevr they need your service. In situation like these, I suggest to go ahead with strong presentation, less SEOed stuff. yes, true put in content, put proper title, meta tags, but don't lose presentability on the cost of SEO. Most of the time I advice corporate clients to go for SEM instead of SEO. SEO is a field too volatile to be relied upon and you should never uild a business model involving employees based exclusively upon SEO traffic.
B) Building a site to generate payday lead - Its a perfect example of my old philosphy - "Ugly Sells". If you want to build a site to generate payday leads, all your intention is getting the visitor to your site just once in his whole life-time. Make you site as much SEOed as possible to attract maximum visitors from SEs. Build your site in plain text. When visitors come to your site they will be repulsed seeing an ugly site and they will try to find a way out of your site. if you have a form on your site to collect in their data or if you have a big flashy link for them to click on the link, in 70% of the case, they will click on the link and they will never come back to your original site. That's what you really cared about your visitors.
