On-page optimizing is still a huge part of helping a site rank for primary head terms as well as mid and long tail keyword.
On-page optimization for keywords identified by Searchlight (Conductors SEO Software) as having on-page issues consistently resulted in rankings increases, by an average of 11.24 positions.
Here is the Video which Rand did a great Whiteboard Friday video (shown below) in which he talks about advanced onsite SEO tactics for content creation, and how they correlate with rankings.
