I have to agree with Nathat on this issue. Let's put it this way... SEO will never be the soul of the party but it will always be the guy that brings that extra 6 pack :)

Now if you don't need the 6 pack then fine... don't worry about it... but I can tell you I had quote requests from people founding me on Google. And on the end of the day that's what pays the bills.

Working with Thematic I can tell you for sure it helps to have good HTML. Put that with proper Page Titles (using AIOS plugin for example) and write your content taking into consideration that you might want to include certain keywords is all that you need for a page to have a good rank in Google.

You don't have to create a post with 40% keywords and 60% information (you might even get penalized for this), just make sure you include those keywords a couple of times and that's all. Well at least for me.