Keyword stuff is abusive, bolding all your keywords should rightly get you penalised. It's not far off the old days of stuffing the defunct meta keywords tag.
First point on googles webmaster guidelines says it all. Your chasing google, build a site for your users first, google will follow because it's in there interest to provide the most relevant content.
Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings.
A good rule of thumb is whether you'd feel comfortable explaining what you've done to a website that competes with you, or to a Google employee.
Another useful test is to ask, "Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn't exist?
What is abusive? With 1 keyword on the page you will not rank. You at least need it in the body, text, url and h1. Is this abusive?
Google tells you to design for the user. This assumes that Google is just as clever as people - what they love to tell you - but which it isn't. That's the main reason people put text blurbs everywhere, create landing pages, put synonyms and different keywords on their pages, because Google is not clever enough.
And your competition just ranks. If you design your pages for users you don't rank from my experience - e.g. people do not care about URLs, do not care about H1 tags on ecommerce pages, don't care about bold, don't care about explanations on ecommerce sites what a t-shirt is or what trousers are . But Google does.
Most of the current high ranking pages, SCREAM "I've been designed for Google!" right into your face.
The text on the page to the bottom and to the left clearly isn't for users.
If you have examples of your SEO work where you rank for keywords and have designed your pages for users and not designed the pages for Google I'd be very interested to learn from you - as would /r/seo.
First point on googles webmaster guidelines says it all. Your chasing google, build a site for your users first, google will follow because it's in there interest to provide the most relevant content.