All the guides a gurus agree that backlinks to your main site are important for ranking well in the search engines. But the term "your main site" is not really clear is it? You have your home page at www.yoursite.com, but then you have any number of landing pages, posts, and other urls at www.yoursite.com/xxx.

Is there any prevailing wisdom on which pages on a site should be receiving these backlinks?

Here is where I get confused. If I obtain zillions of backlinks to my main site url, that probably won't help me rank on a specific keyword if that word doesn't happen to be on the front page. If I want to push a certain post optimized for a certain keyword phrase, it would seem that I should get as many good backlinks to that post's url as I can. But those links would then not go to the front page, and I don't know if that's a bad thing or not.

Did that make any sense?

Thanks.

Ken