I studied my keywords and noticed several around page 2 or 3 on SERPS So i made an assumption that some good internal linking using the keyword in the anchor text in the same site would push the rankings up to page 1 In effect i used the "Blogroll" style links in WordPress so i had a top 10 searched area listing these 10 keyword rich links on the right column of EVERY page Since then my traffic overall on the site has gone down its almost a month since this change So what should i do? A) Assume Google/search engines doesn't like 100s of links on a right column and therefore its triggered a negative score B) Allow more time than a month C) Remove the links from the right column of every page and just add the key word to the landing page a few more times natuarlly into the content D) None of the above...instead tell me what you would do Many thanks for your time Zane
10 keywords on every page should not be a problem, specially if they are different. In any case, I suggest you vary your anchor texts in the different pages, for example adding longer tail keywords (e.g., if the anchor text is widgets", change it to to "blue smart widgets"). The issue is probably not so much on-page SEO but off-page SEO. Try getting incoming links, and make sure that the link anchors with your keywords are different, or wit will not look "natural". NOBODY got a #1 ranking only with internal links.
In my opinion, your on-site may be an issue. It is my understanding that in google's algorithm, there is a scoring on link words vs content words. If you do not have a supporting amount of content (in general) on your pages, links will hurt ranking/indexing. If you add content that supports your link to these pages, not only will your content overall be a higher count, but your link will be somewhat relevant and give higher quality scoring.