If you were to have a single article within your site that produced the majority of inbound links (most links would point to this page rather that the home page), would the search engines rate these links better, worse or the same as if they were pointng to the site's home page?
Search engines rank PAGES, not links. So if persons search for some type of content which is written on your internal page, it's natural search engines will rate this internal page higher.
Just to make things a bit more clear.. Each page on your website is just like a different website. All search engines rank pages individually, so year a page with a higher link popularity will soon gain higher search engine positions. Al.
I know that SEs rank pages, but every piece of advice on SEO says that quality inbound links and unique content are the 2 most important things to do to achieve better performance. If I want to use different pages to target different keyword combinations, then you are saying that only the page that has the inbound links will perform better? So, if all your inbound links point to your site's home page, these won't help all your other pages and the keyword combinations within them?
I try to get links to each blog post, and some blog posts appear in the first page for that particular set of keywords. However, I try to group that particular blog post with other blog posts of similar topic. In this case, the internal link is created.