Hello, I was wondering how everyone goes about ranking for internal page keywords. Besides proper SEO on the page which I already do, but I believe relative backlinks to these internal pages using the specific keyphrase must have a huge effect on ranking in SERPS. What I guess my main question is how do you guys go about getting backlinks for those internal long-tail keyphrases? Especially when you can have 100's of these long-tail keyphrases?. Should I be focusing on backlinks to my home page and forget about trying to get backlinks for each of these different (but related) long-tail keyphrases? Thanks.
It's fine and appreciated by Google, if you have backlinks to your internal pages. It is a page which will rank in Google after all. The most natural link, is one which comes from a blog post or forum post or article and points directly to the page. Links from home pages to home pages have less value lately. I still suppose PR of the linking site is a strong factor (link from a low PR page on a high PR site still has a lot of value).
It's much better if the links go directly to the specific inner page instead of the home page. Also, you should try to get links that have the targeted keywords in the anchor text. But to make it look natural, you should generally only use one keyword per link, so if you have several main keywords, you will need to get a number of different links to cover the various possibilities.
It is good if internal pages is directly linked.Put the keywords related to your page in title, description , keywords meta tags.
Many free directories will allow you to drop a few keywords into the title when submitting, others wont and insist on the URL only which is not so useful for links to your inner pages.