Many people forget to check these basic things before making blog posts or writing an article and then wonder why they they suck in Google SERP. So here is a check list: 1. Is the keyword related to the entire websites content? 2. Is the keyword you are aiming at in the title? 3. Have you typed the keyword in the article body in different forms? Like if you type LA Real Estate in your article a 100 times, Google will find out, type it in different ways like real estate in LA etc.. 4. Is your article of any worth to human users? 5. Is your article getting links from other pages in your blog/website? 6. Have you used the bold tag in your article? 7. Is the keyword density good? at about 4 - 5 %, there are softwares to check this. 8. Is your article long enough? If the answer is yes to all of these questions then you have to build more links but if its a keyword with low competition, you will get top SERP. Any thoughts? Is there something else you check for?
Also: Keyword in page name Keyword in h1 tags Keyword in italics Keyword underlined Keyword in last sentence Keyword in alt tags Keyword in meta tags Keyword in meta description I'm not suggesting you do all of these on the same page, otherwise G may ban you for spamming, but they are all worthy of consideration. The two top ones are page title and h1 tags.
Yeah repeating keywords a lot of time, or sometimes called as keyword stuffing is not at all good. Here is a tool that helps you find the keyword density.