It's a great article and a good explanation of one way in which a website should be optimized. I have "issues" with the term "landing page" though. I like to work more with "entry points". This could be a personal thing I realize, because I got fed-up of seeing landing pages that had zero synergy with the rest of the site. It's like clients want or need to re-invent the wheel every time and not built-upon their already existing website content architecture. In this way they end up with a bunch of one-off pages that have a finite shelf-life and usually end up getting very high bounce rates (single page-view visits).
"Entry point" pages distance themselves from landing pages in that it implies, at least an evaluation of the current information architecture to find the best space through which to channel the desired highly targeted traffic. This is how I see them at least.
Although the concept is correct I'm just biased in this way against the term "landing pages", because if they are not understood and developed correctly they end up being not only "landing pages" but "take-off pages" above anything else.
The article describes all the right techniques for developing them though, which I can attest I have come across and use in my SEO compliant development as well. Namely using the actual keywords in page urls, using H title tags, metatags, "keyword centric" copy writing, etc. Which by the way, hold true for any page, not just landing pages. With search engine's ability to index almost all your pages and linking to them, all pages are potential landing pages, from the general (home page) to the particular (product leaf pages for example). They attract more or less targeted audience depending on the specificity of what you are talking about on a given page. The more you drill down on the specificity of any given subject that you talk about on your website, the more targeted your traffic will be, at least in theory and from traffic coming from search engines. Traditionally a traffic funnel has the wider end in the home page and the thinner end on the leaf pages, but also, these "entry points" will make traffic by-pass completely the wider mouth funnel which is a great time saver for users looking for specificity.
This brings me to the "long tail" concept that is mentioned also. It is a relatively new term in economics invented by Wired Editor Chris Anderson. The SEO article explains what it is as it relates to keywords but rather in an incomplete way in my opinion. Long Tail search phrases are called that way, not just because they have multiple words on them, which is what the article implies, but because the longer the phrase, the more targeted it is and the less people will search for it. This is why they are inexpensive to buy as adWrods, but if you add the complete volume of all the long tail search phrases that brought the site maybe one or two visits each, they add up to much more that the volume of hits gotten by highly popular keywords.
Very interesting economic concept that the internet help bring about with it's massive ability to reach millions and millions of customers at any given moment with millions of unique interests and needs. It has been the foundation of Amazon's success as we all know.
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