Lets say the keywords I want to rank for (and for my articles to rank for) are: Dog Food and Dog Chow. My question: Is it risky to write 20 articles and submit them to ezinearticles and have them all have Dog Food and Dog Chow as the two anchor text terms (in the author bio)? Or is it wiser to embed the keywords amongst other words, thus making it appear more 'natural' to google. Example: Great Dog Chow Affordable Dog Chow Easy Dog Food Great Dog Food etc.etc. ??
you are always better to make the links look more natural where possible, however i dont think you would get any penalty for have 20 backlinks the same, but i would try and vary them from site to site. maybe you could submit 2 articles to 10 different directories, at least that way the backlinks are coming from different class C IP's
It would be better to mix them up for you long term strategy, but initially 20 to target your main keywords will be fine ... but as mentioned above you need to think about links coming from the same domain and IP become less and less valuable ! See my previous post: http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=1074077