In the middle of the 2000 decade, I used to highlight for Google the most important landing pages by placing links to them in a menu. Menu is located on every page, so these internal links from every page did some good stuff for those landing pages rankings (so the SERp rise was noticable in one month after menu update). Recently, I tried to repeat the trick for my new site. And... it did not work. I tried again for another site - no response in SERP again. The positions (of those landing pages, to which I was adding the links in the menu) stayed the same without any attempts to increase. Conclusion: Google got smart, probably, and filters out menu links. Any opposite experiences?
I noticed that use in-content links to push your important pages menu & footer links dont pass the juice they used to
Placing a link in your content or on Menu might pass link-juice to them provided the link residing on the page having minimum PR3. But I've ever noticed or read that they help in ranking on search engine results page just as GeorgeKuipers said!
It seems site wide links aren't as important as they use to be so its better to have them in the page itself with relevant text around it.
I don't agree. I just think that with Wordpress and other out of the box CMS' systems, that the average webmaster just got a big SEO boost without really working for it. So, your tactics are still ok, it's just that a lot of other people are doing it. A sitewide, anchor text link still rocks, particularly from a related site.
I have never used WorPress, or any other CMS for my commercial sites. So your shot is not to the target here, unfortunately. And on sitewide..., got bad experience a year ago with a sitewide links from two huge websites onto my site -> positions stay the same, but got a huge drop in PR for acceptor site.