Homepage Vs. Inner Page Backlink Building?

[JABacchetta]

If I'm trying to rank multiple inner pages, when does strengthening the homepage become more productive than strengthening the inner pages themselves? Is there a strategy to this?

For example, maybe you build up a few dozen backlinks to each inner page, and then focus all your efforts on the homepage?

Because, from my understanding, strengthening the homepage will go a long way towards helping your inner pages rank. Is that correct?

[WesleySmits]

It has a lot to do with the kind of website that you have.

In general you want to get a lot of links to the pages that you want to get found on. (blog posts, product pages etcetera)
But in general the homepage gets the most links because when people see your website and they like it the homepage is the most logical URL to link to.

Strengthening the home page will be helpful to your site because the homepage should be your content hub. You can find more information about content hubs, website architecture and a lot more here: http://moz.com/blog/how-to-rank

Hope i answered your question
Let me know if you have any other questions or if i was unclear about something.

[Perfect007]

Home page backlinks will distribute the link juice on whole inner page. Most of the time home page gets backlinks because of the most prompt page of the website. But it also depends on  the most relevant link concept. If your inner page is best relevant  for getting any backlink then you should choose inner one.

But most of the backlink provider resources(directory, forum signature etc.) prefer home page of websites.

[MoosaHemani]

I believe if you are building links the right way and promoting your brand as well you will see links coming to your home page automatically mostly because of your brand name visibility in the target market.

I believe you should focus on building links to pages that contain quality no matter if they are inner pages, non commercial pages or anything else...

[BrianJGomez]

yes your understanding is correct, building links to your home page will increase your domain authority over time and domain authority is defined as (paraphrasing) 'the likelihood of new content on your site to rank'.

That being said, every site owner has pages they'd like to showcase and more importantly, ensure that the page is getting good SERP placement. For that deep linking is critical. If you don't deep link, Google will sometimes display your home page as the url for a keyword that you'd have preferred go to an internal page.

For instance if you want your home page to rank for 'Widgets' and you want MySIte.com/purple-widgets/ to rank for 'Purple Widgets', your better off deep linking with 'purple widget' related (for link diversity purposes) anchor text to your interior pages. This will help you make sure your home page doesn't rank for 'Purple Widgets'.

[toddmumford]

Strengthening the home page with inbound branded links, and mixed commercialized / brand links from editorial / high quality sources builds authority, which as Perfect007 mentioned, distributes 'weight' throughout the website.

This improved domain authority tends to move relevant associated topics within the website up in rankings more than non-related areas. For example, the more tightly knit the homepage is to the categories that comprise it, the more inbound link building to the homepage impacts those pages.

At the same time, link building to strategic inner pages moves the needle as well, and reinforces authority to associated related sub categories and 'sister' categories in the website.

As a basic rule of thumb, competition being equal - the further apart your inner categories are insofar as relations, the more authority you need to build at the base level (root, homepage) in order to move inner categories forward.

Hope this helps.