my website has different categories and therefore different keywords. they are all quite similar though (have one keyword the same e.g. cheap). i was wondering if it is best to link to the different pages of my site e.g. cheap house, cheap mansion, cheap villa with appropriate keywords. or to use all the keywords on my homepage. does google penalize for toovaried keywords?
I don't think there were penalty for such behaviors. But I think you might want to have about at least 75% of your backlinks to your homepage using your main targeted keywords as anchor text. Of course, using variants of your main keywords and building deep links to your inner pages are also loved by SEs Have a nice day,
Don't stuff keywords on home page. I like 1 per paragraph at most. Internal pages and category pages are more effective in the end, because you want specific customers to enter in the section they are searching for.
Yeah definitely keep mixing up the anchor text of your back links. I would do a significant amount of YOURWEBSITE.com anchor text links. It's a very natural looking link.
Here is my advice. 1. Avoid keyword stuffing on your homepage. It would be easily to be identical by major search engines. 2. There would be no penalty for variation anchor text. As AirForce1 stated, you can vary them but keep high ratio on your targeted keyword. 3. I would recommend you do internal linking between relevant pages. Do not linking to all inner pages from homepage only, just doe some or it would harm your site later.
I would recommend to target different keywords on different pages and do the same with anchor text in link building. i.e. targeting different pages with different keywords rather than pointing all backlinks to home page
Home page is the most powerful in terms of optimization, so I think you should concentrate on linking to the home page only. Although, it wont hurt to link to others either.
Here is my take: 1. Make sure to target your main term in the home page and don't keyword stuff metas. You may target 1-4 variations of your keywords for the main page. 2. Build relevant backlinks to your inner pages, for instance if an inner page talks about "cheap house reviews" then take that for your link anchors 3. You need both, home page links and deeplinks. 4. Google doesn't penalize your site for targeting several keywords (or their variations) ... you would actually be penalized if all of your anchors used the same keyword all around. Why? because it doesn't look natural and would look too much like spam. For instance, imagine you had a site with 10k links and all links used the same anchor, now what are chances of that happening naturally?