Linking to the homepage with internal keyword anchor text.

Yes or no?

[JackR]

My site has the usual nav bar complete with “Home” on the left hand side.

On each page there are also one or two keyword anchor text links back to the homepage, for example:

www.example.com/example.html has a text link “example” with the target as the homepage.

Does this internal linking stretegy add value? If not, can it be considered harmful?

Taking this a step further, does linking back to the homepage from the homepage itself in the format

href="http://www.example">Example</a>

... carry any benefit?

[lakr]

Yes, it brings you benefits but at risk.

I have seen many sites doing so, and their rankings are very high for given keywords in internal anchor text. But I do not want to try this because it looks a bit spammy.

[canuck]

Definitely - linking to your homepage with useful keywords can help ranking. The key is to do it so it doesn't look like spam to the search engines, and also adds value to your visitors.

CSS can be great for creating SEO internal links... but that's a whole other story!

[JackR]

CSS can be great for creating SEO internal links...

canuck, please elaborate ...