Keywords repeated in navigation links

[dwilson]

I am developing a site optimized for a 2-word phrase ... say "blue widget". My design calls for a standard navigation bar on the left-hand side of every page. Topics would be
Blue Widget History
Blue Widget news
Blue Widget book reviews
Teachers' resources for Blue Widgets
Blue Widget Art
etc.

Each page will have 2-300 words of content in the body section ... which may or may not mention the key phrase. The navigation links belong there for the user ... but they don't necessarily all have to say "Blue Widget" somewhere in them. Am I overusing my phrase, and likely to be penalized?

Thanks for the help on this one.

[netguy]

dwilson... I use a similar format on several sites and have experienced no penalties. I believe the important part is having sufficient 'non-keyword' content along with the keywords/phrases.

[jimbeetle]

Why do the words "Google" and "Penalty" always seem to go hand-in-hand? Just because somebody is under- or over-using certain elements weighted by Google's algorithm doesn't mean that a "penalty" might be incurred. It simply means that a person is publishing a poorly-designed page that is going to rank lower in the SERPs as opposed to well-designed pages.

Now that I've got that off my chest...

Link text is very important and how many occurrences you have on a page is up to what you know about your visitors, your site design and other on-page factors such as overall keyword density.

The point that would concern me is...

2-300 words of content in the body section ... which may or may not mention the key phrase

In general Google and other SEs really do like to see the keywords in the text. If possible try to include your keyword phrase in an H1, at the beginning of a paragraph, the middle of the page, end of the page, blah, blah...also try to scatter a few supporting or secondary keywords and plurals if applicable.