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I don't think it will hurt rankings for your other important keywords, it will just increase the number of keywords that attract traffic.  Links from development sites should help your overall keyword rankings. To me, it makes sense that developers would naturally link to a site that has created a web application. SEOMoz appears to have taken the approach you suggested with their development blog: http://devblog.seomoz.org/ Other examples: http://dev.hubspot.com/ https://developer.apple.com/news/ https://developers.facebook.com/blog/ https://developer.amazon.com/blog/index.html https://engineering.groupon.com/ http://www.bigfishgames.com/blog/category/game-development/

I would say it does but in a indirect way - more traffic = more brand based queries etc and more talk about brand on web etc Also google sees bounce rates etc which do play a roll So the short answer in my a opinion is yes but not enough to use it as a seo tactic

Awesome! Thank you Anthony and Albin.

No problem, Jessica! Glad you found the information helpful. One last point. Depending on your site design, you may have an opportunity to pass some of your home page's ranking power to your most important landing pages by linking to them from the home page. For example, we have persistent links on our home page to our top 10 games, games that convert new visitors very well, and game genres. While part of this is user experience oriented, a lot of it is also to pass on the home page's ranking power to those pages we want to rank well on the SERPs. The links on your home page shouldn't be random. Think strategically about what you link to from your home page.