I have seen sites that use the following type of SEO and I wonder if it is effective or considered keyword stuffing by the search engines. I will use flowers as an example... In the navigation bar these sites will have something like Flower arrangements Flower plants flower vases flower specials flower ordering artificial flower flower care etc... (basically every link will have the target keyword in it, sitewide) These will be hyperlinks, and each leads to a page that has links to 5-10 articles on that topic. So, I pose the question, does this type of internal linking help or hurt for SEO purposes?
It depends how much other content is on the page but I see more and more people getting in trouble from Google for doing stuff like that. If you have a lot of content on that page, you will most likely be ok, but if you page has mostly ads and those links, it will cause problems with Google.
I wouldn't do it. Keep each page optimized for your target phrase, but your menu links have what makes sense from your user's perspective (arrangements, vases, plants, etc.).
I've seen many people do that. I don't think that it is going to hurt you. Also make sure that the url contains the same target keywords. ie your file names should be like flower-arrangements/flower-arrangement-1.html . Because, from what I've heard, Google gives much importance to having the keywords in the url.
That's indeed spamming. What I usually do is that I make sure that there's a good variety of relevant keywords on my homepage and side bars. --Joe
I agree, i would not think that doing that would be seo friendly. In this situation, I think that the consequences are worse than the benefits.