He's right, that's really a primer on building a site for the benefit of the SE's. I always tell people though that they need to remember that you are building the site for the user as well. So make sure that after you have done the 10 things mentioned, that you now go back and see if your site is user friendly. Then, Once that is done. Then you start the optimization.
Quite simply, search engines love content - the more content there is on a page the easier it is for search engines to work out what the page is actually about. Search engines may struggle to work out the point of a web page with less than 200 words, ultimately penalising that page in the search rankings.
i don't think that this setup is being followed, most site does not follow 200 word minimum per page!