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The short answer is no, using a keyword 7 or 8 times certainly isn't spam - unless there's no other content! But look at the page in the context of the whole site - where it fits in the structure, how it is linked, anchor text, how much content about the topic is on the site, etc.
Remember, getting in the SERPs is a (very important) first step. But searchers will look at the snippet and title bfore clicking, and will read the text after they click. If they do not like what they see ...
Since "Personals" "Singles" and "Dating" are extremely competitive keywords, I am creating sub-pages that focus on a certain city and contain a button that is hyperlinked back to my main page. The title and keywords should read very nicely as well. An example is "Tampa Singles" and "Tampa Personals" and the sub-page (250+ words of content) talks about how my website can help a person meet people from there. Those keywords are repeated several times throughout the article. I'm adding a few links to some other Tampa dating websites as well with that text, and I hope to find some other Tampa dating websites that will add a link to my sub-page as "Tampa Singles" and "Tampa Personals".
One thing I'm trying to figure out is how competitive different keyword combinations are. Is there a way to measure different keyword combinations so that I can manage to make it to the top of the SERP's and start getting at least a LITTLE traffic?
Thanks!
Using the words in anchor text within the site navigation (sensibly, not over-doing) is intuitive for users. It's helpful, and should be done on a certain percentage of the inbound links to the site.
A really good way to get a feel is to spend a few hours digging around the Google cache for a variety of searches. Those highlighted words give a good, quick birds-eye view - keeping in mind that it's only part of the whole picture among all the variables used in scoring.
