targetting terms without revealing them to competitors

[danger]

as i understand it, one SEO method to increase rank for a given term is to write a page of content about the term, but I'm concerned about linkint to the SEO page from my homepage or a sitemap.

In my case, that would be keyword gold for my competition because I also use those same terms in PPC, which very few of them bid on at the moment. If I linked to the terms from a page they're likely to see, they'd think christmas had come early!

as someone who's never done any SEO, I'm interested to hear how people get around this problem