optimised pages and penalties

how to avoid penalties

[charlie]

I am building my new site and want it to rank well in Google as that is where 90% of my current traffic comes from. My business is in a competetive area and there are 8 main search terms I want to optimise for. I have already bulit my home page and optimsed that for 1 set of keywords. Now I want use that page with just copy changes for the other 7 sets of keywords. I dont want to change anything else on the pages and there is just 100 words of copy on each page. Will Google penalise some or all of these pages, or this allowable?

[Receptional Andy]

>Now I want use that page with just copy changes for the other 7 sets of keywords. I dont want to change anything else on the pages<

I'm getting alarm bells here. Make unique content for each keyword or you are unlikely to rank well on one page if at all. If these are major keywords your targetting they deserve a page of content each.

Just changing a few keywords on each page sounds to me like your making a site purely for search engines not for users - I wouldn't want to read 7 identical pages.

[WibbleWobble]

As I understand it, charlie wants the same template for each page, with simple "copy changes" (ie, new text). This should be fine, unless you are just changing keywords. I don't think one hundred words to a page will improve rankings that much though, I'd aim for much more than that if possible.