Penalties for long tail keyword

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

• 
  Ben Baligad: Hello again. Thanks again for the panel on answering SEO questions. ;
  
  If you rank for a particular long tail keyword on a particular post, what are the SEO penalties, if any for adding or changing the words of other posts to accommodate those keywords? ;
  
  Of course, those words should be relevant. Therefore, if one or two words do not fit, then it will not be added. What I mean is adding or changing words without radically changing the main idea of the post. ;
• 
  Nebojsa Djukic: Hi Ben! Always keep in mind that your content should be written for human readers, not search engines. Make changes in your articles if you think they are necessary and then read it several times. If articles still sounds natural after changes then you'll be fine.
  
  It's good to add a few additional keywords, some synonyms etc if you missed to do that when you wrote your article, but don't overdo it. ;
  
  If articles are already good and your only goal is not to improve user experience but to get better position in Google, perhaps you should invest time and efforts in website promotion instead of article editing.
• 
  Ben Baligad: +Nebojsa Djukic ;
  
  Thanks. That was helpful.
  
  It is alright then in some cases. What I was afraid of is if it is always not good for SEO. ;
• 
  Rotimi Orimoloye (Orims): First be sure you are even getting traffic from this long-tail keyword before you start creating clones of it. Otherwise, what's the point?
  
  I don't think you can get penalized for changing titles anyway.....however, you might not achieve so much either.
  
  Instead of changing titles to suit the ranking phrase, why not consider linking from the ranking page to the other pages that are relevant, and encouraging readers to click through?
• 
  Ben Baligad: Hello, +Rotimi Orimoloye ;
  
  I do not plan on changing titles.
  
  I think I got Panda'd by changing words to get a better position on Google, like +Nebojsa Djukic ; is warning me against. More than that, I used them as anchors to the outgoing links. That is clearly a link scheme as defined by Google. ;My impressions went way down and has not recovered.
  
  I did go back and fix the anchor part, but not the long tail keyword I was trying to rank for. They are still there, but not as anchors.  ;I was thinking of either going back and put them back to what it was before I added the keywords or simply work on web promotion as Nebojsa says and fix them as I run into them.