A poster at WebmasterWorld.com asks about using different anchor/link text to point to the same page for SEO.
This is a good question and I though I'd share some quick insight as to how I normally approach link development in terms of anchor-text diversification.
The short answer is that diversity in inbound links is a good thing, because it shows that: a) the links are less likely to be auto-generated or copy/pasted everywhere, and; b) the page is relevant within a variety of slightly different contexts (presuming the same general topic).
The longer answer is that although some diversity in anchor text is a good thing, you need to be careful not to overdo it in case you dilute ranking potential for the real keywords. If a page has 100 inbound links but none of them are the same or they don't even contain the same keyword, then how will a search engine know which keywords are most relevant (besides looking at on-page content!). The best thing to do is to make sure that at least 50-60% of inbound links contain the root keyword - or one of it's closely stemmed variants or synonyms - in combination with other words. The rest of the links can be whatever, but ideally there would be some consistent phrase usage too.
The other thing to consider is the positioning of the link itself, and whether or not it's an internal link or a link from an external site. If the link is from a global navigation menu, then it's not practical (or good) to make that link different on every page just for SEO (plus, UX people would scream at you). Also, if the links are internal, then I think the tolerance to lower diversity in link text is higher (the same people will probably use the same descriptions multiple times). Considering links from multiple external sites, it makes sense to think that there should be higher diversity in link text because there are probably multiple writers involved, and no 2 writers will do exactly the same thing.