When given a keyword to use in an article.. Does it need to be word for word?

[Jake]

They probably want the exact phrase, but in reality this is a somewhat outdated technique, Google's increasing quality standards no mat see that repeated phrase as SEO spam, it would probably be better to use variations of the phrase, some webmasters now just specify the topic to avoid unnatural looking text that may be easily identified by the growing number of human site reviewers Google is employing.