Internal anchor text. Should we still use keywords?

[jim_shook]

I have a review site that has approximately 70 category pages.

I'd like to include a few of them (not all 70) in the footer of the page for easy navigation and to direct the crawlers to the best ones.

Is it advisable to use anchor text of "Category + reviews" or just leave it as "Category".

I certainly dont want it to be overoptimized, but I do think its a good usability cue, so I'd be surprised if it was against guidelines.

Any thoughts?

[AlanMosley]

As long as your link text is relevant to the pages you should be fine.

But footer links are discounted buy search engines. and mostly missed by users. If you want those pages to rank I would be looking at putting the links further up the page.

Also linking to as many pages from the homepage as possible is a good thing, here is a good read about internal linking

http://thatsit.com.au/seo/tutorials/a-simple-explanation-of-pagerank

[WilliamKammer]

It isn't against guidelines, but there are a few things you should know. Footer and sidebar links do not have as much value as in-body links. If you can naturally link (not try to shove anchor text in) to some of those categories in the main content of the main page, that would be ideal. If the anchor text isn't perfectly ideal, use alt and title tags to help indicate your focus. Hopefully your site structure is set up in a way that things can be navigated from the top nav, so you don't need to put in footer links for usability.

[CSawatzky]

My personal guideline is to make it sound as natural as possible. William and Alan are correct, what you're doing isn't against any rules, and footer links don't hold up as much value - especially because their on the bottom of the page.

Maybe you could do a list that says something like:

See More Reviews:
Category XCategory Y
Category Z

To me, that doesn't sound spammy or clogged up at all. Also, just keep in mind that the more links you have on a page, the less page rank they carry onto other pages of your site.