Similar Keywords in Articles

Let's say I've found two (or more) long tail keywords that are basically the same search term.

Sample 1: "how to clean ears"
Sample 2: "how to clean my ears"
Sample 3: "clean my ears"

When I'm developing my site to target these keywords in articles, how should I approach them? If I SEO one article to nail "how to clean ears," and create another article targeting "how to clean my ears," is Google going to recognize this and punish both articles for being similar?

Is there any way right to approach this where I can target all of my keywords with subtle search differences? I know that I could always write an article one tier down and link it up to the main article, but I'd like to get all the traffic directly to my site if possible.

Scary,

You should include these keywords on the same page giving the most important placement to the main keyword you would like to rank the page for. It is important to keep your pages tightly themed and include keyword variations on the same page. As a rule if the words can fit into the same category (i.e. they are pretty much talking about the exact same thing and are similar in terms of spelling, include them on the same page).

If your most important phrase is how to clean ears, make sure that goes first in your title tag and toward the front of your meta description. It should also be more prominent on the page than the other variations.

I like these best practices,
http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/on-page-factors

Hope that helps,

Shawn

Adding both keywords once in the article will not hurt. But don't over optimize. Use any one keyword in headlines and another as ordinary keyword and rotate vice versa.

It will be hard to get any phrase repeated enough times without over optimizing some of the words with in it.

Words like "it", "and" , "the" don't count - they are "stop" words that (we are told) Google ignores.
However "clean" is a word with comercial possibilities AND it is not a stop word.
If you go much above 3% with that you might get hit with over op.
However if you go too low with it you'll struggle to repeat the various different phrases you want to optimize enough times for them to gain relevance.

Longer articles or more articles is the obvious answer.

Scritty

In one article I would have "how to clean my ears" as the title. And in the content area I would sprinkle in how to clean ears in there. Google can easily figure out the rest from there.

All you need to do now is build links using the keywords you're trying to rank for.