On Page Optimization For Niche Site

Do some general keyword research and have a few strong ones in mind for each page, but don't over-focus on this - many do and they end up sabotaging the content with an unnatural imbalance of forced keyword usage which may end up being totally irregular in density in comparison to elsewhere, making the manipulation obvious on some level to Google...

I would advise you write for humans.

Everybody is writing for Google, but if no HUMAN clicks your title or links back to your content... it won't do much good in the long run. Go for quality content wherby keywords naturally arise from your organic use of them; be conscious of the use and if there's an instance in which you notice you could use X keyword and it sounds conversational and ideal, and there's no reason not to - do it. But don't over-do it.

As I said - write for humans; the title should be clear, concise and compelling. By compelling, I don't mean it has to be novelistic, just that it should have a 'conceptual snap' in order to appeal to a human who sees it; for example some minor play on a word, some element of humour... some kind of emotional input that is useless to Google, but appealing to a human. It's about balancing both to a T.

Google likes the keywords, humans like the phrasing. Merge those worlds.

As for content: just make sure it's original and of true value. If your content isn't of much value, it doesn't matter how expert your SEO applications are; you may initially rank pretty good for following basic SEO guidelines but this will soon fade as people don't 'socially vote' on your content over others, by way of sharing it, reading over it for a long time, bookmarking it and linking back to it.

Again, it's just about merging the two worlds.

Please Google, and please humans but if there were to be a ratio, I'd give it 7:3 to humans.

Enter 'alt tags' and 'title tags' for any images on the page; and write an effective (clear, keyword friendly and interesting to read) meta description tag: many people seem to think Google disregard meta tags now, as I think Google implied that once... but meta descriptions are definitely still valued. I have seen clear ranking improvements from minor edits of that field alone.

Good content; basic guideline compliance and neat, user-friendly, major-error-free structure.

Hope that helped. Good luck!