Hi,
I've submitted articles before with a decent amount of success, but I've always wondered, is it better to link to the home page or the page that you're trying to get to number 1 in the search engines?

For example, if I discover that the keyword "blue widgets" (An example keyword to to help keep things simple), get's a lot of traffic and is directly related to my website, I'm going to want to rank highly for that search term.

So I make a seo'd page on my site all about "blue widgets", and then (After I've seen that that particular page has been indexed by the search engines), create a very similar article and send it off to as many relevant article directories and such as I can find.

Now, in the authors resource box I would put "check out my cool new website about "blue widgets"".

I would make the text "Blue Widgets" a link to:

A. The home page so they see my site from the front page and maybe sign up to my newsletter/forum etc

B. The seo'd original page to increase inbound links with very highly relevant anchor text.

or C. ?

To me, the answer seems to be obviously B, but I've never actually done this (Stupid me), I've always linked to the home page.

My reason for thinking this is that I want MY site to be ranked at the top of the search engines so people come directly to me, and not through some article directory that might end up ranking higher for the keyword using my article.

To achieve this I would need a good few high quality links.

Am I thinking about this the wrong way, or is my thinking on track?

While you're here, can anyone offer advice on use social networks to increase inbound links. I've heard the buzz, but never actually understood.

Thanks guys.