I'm not too concerned with SEO when writing an article. I think the goal should be to write something useful for actual human readers. Because even if you do end up ranking well on Google, if the article is shit, Google will eventually learn the article is shit (e.g. people immediately go back to Googling after clicking on your article) and you'll end up losing the ranking anyway.

That said, there are some SEO-related things I still do:

1. Use words people look for (aka keywords)
2. Use semantic HTML (title, h1, h2, etc)
3. Link to it using fitting descriptions (e.g. not [click here] to read about foobar, but read about [foobar]" if foobar is your topic)
4. Get other sites to link to it (don't buy links, write something worth linking to)