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[whatson]

If you are trying to position a page in your site for a particular keyword would it still benefit from link text from the other pages in that site? Or does this only count for sites with a different domain.

[MHes]

Anchor text within a site is very important. They count as links in and the anchor text has impact for both the page it is on, and the page it is pointing to. There may be a slight dampening of this effect within a site, as opposed to external links in, but still very important.

[fathom]

In addition to MHes comments... the pages with the most anchors are also the pages with the best chance of ranking well on more competitive phrases.

Often the mainpage has the most anchors to it (plus external ones) but not always.

[WarmGlow]

whatson,

In support of the previous comments, here is an example of a Google referral that was in my daily log file today. The keywords are those that I would not use to search for this page and the referral surprised me. I think this might provide some insight for you.

Searched the web for keyword1 keyword2. Results 11 - 20 of about 696,000.

The search query returned a page from my site in the #14 position. My page has a Google Toolbar PageRank of 5/10. Keyword1 occurs one time in the page title, one time in the URI and one time in H2 headline text. There are no other occurrences of keyword1 in the body text. Keyword1 page frequency is 2 with a density of 0.04 percent. Keyword2 occurs one time in the META description tag and one time in the body text. Keyword2 page frequency is 2 with a density of 0.04 percent. There are no occurrences of "keyword1 keyword2" as an exact phrase anywhere on the page. I can not find any off-site pages that link to this page. So far, this looks too weak to be in the first 100 results.

Here is the part that gets interesting. The page is linked from 14 other pages on my site with keyword2 in the anchor text. I interpret this as further evidence of the power of anchor text. At least until AD (After Dominic). ;)