If i have a main / home page that is optimized and is ranking for "Dog Food", does it help my main pages rankings to have a content rich subpage that has an article on "organic dog food" with an ANCHOR TEXT LINK titled Dog Food that links back to my main page? ? Will this help my main pages ranking in the serps for Dog Food? Or does it not matter since its within my own site?
Yes it will help, no doubt. But make sure you maximize this by adding nofollows to your human friendly navigation. e.g. many websites have a link back to the home page called Home since a user readily identifies with that. So make that link a nofollow to ensure you give more power to the other link with the anchor text you want to rank for. Also be sure to add nofollows to privacy policies, terms, about us, etc to preserve the all important link juice for the pages that matter. Cheers