Thank you for this good discussion. We have a town website we developed and recently I removed our footer link. Instead, at the bottom of the homepage I put a quick line of text that says Designed By "Company Name". Now only the homepage links to us so it is ok to utilize this highest PR ranking page of their site to boost one of our keywords.
We have no official tests but we have made tremendous leaps for that keyword recently.
In summary, rather than not being able to use keywords in anchor text and gaining a ton of links all at one time (if its a large site) doesn't it make more sense to make a link in the body at the bottom of the highest PR page of the site or even homepage that says Designed By "Company Name"?
Granted placing this on only a handful of pages will reduce your overall brand exposure.
