Adding new pages then linking to them from old pages, Any risks?

[FranticFish]

I've taken on a site for a small service provider firm. They had a redesign (not from me) about 15 months ago and recently I was asked to look into getting them more traffic.

The most important pages in the site for them are only linked to from one page in the site presently. This is because they have a top menu and then sub navigation per section i.e.
ABOUT US / partner 1, partner 2
SERVICES / service 1, service 2

The site has a blog, and this has good quality content (to justify this rather sweeping statement, they are writing articles for the national press and are also going to become columnists on one of the most popular sites in their niche).

Their SERVICES section has 6 pages (including overview). I want to add probably another 10-15 more.

There is no internal linking on the site.
There are 60 odd blog pages presently.
A redesign is out of the question; they love the design, so do their clients.

So my question is this:

If I add new pages to the SERVICES section and then link existing pages from the blog to them, am I risking anything - these days?

1) I want readers to be able to get from a blog post directly to the service that relates to that post (they can't at present)

2) I want more links to these pages anyway

3) I'll make sure links used very varied text

Normally I would have just done this without thinking. I'm still confident it shouldn't pose a problem. What do others think?

[tedster]

I've continued doing this with well established sites even up to last month, and only seen positive results.

I want readers to be able to get from a blog post directly to the service that relates to that post

That's the key - do it for the readers. The SEO value will naturally be embedded in that kind of change. If you try only to force SEO value, that's when I see sites getting into trouble.

[FranticFish]

I saw an example of just that the other day. Unnatural links in blog posts to a page had killed it for 2 of the 4 terms it was optimised for. It was ranking fine for the other 2.

Per-term penalisation based on obvious and poor optimisation. Now it *was* done badly, from 'cookie-cutter' content (whereas this will be done properly, from decent content) but I've heard so much lately about people tweaking very small things and making it worse that I just wanted to gather some recent views on this.

[aristotle]

If you're going to add a lot of new links, it might be safer to do it gradually or in stages, rather than all at once. Or maybe it doesn't matter at all, and I'm just cautious by nature.

[Simsi]

I do this and it does help but when I do, I don't just change existing text into an anchor. I firstly re-touch the text in the old article to a) ensure it's still current and b) to make it a bit more obvious to the user why the new link is there.

There is another reason: by doing that it becomes more obvious to *me* whether adding the link is really relevant. Sometimes it is hard to build in a reference to that new link and in those instances, I question whether it really is relevant to add it.

[FranticFish]

Simsi, that's a good yardstick. Thanks for all replies.