I'm new a to SEO and wondered if you get listings for a desired search term for your home page does Google regard that as more important than another page within your site and therefore ignore it?

The best thing to do is to try and SEO your inner pages as well, but differently. Aim to go for different keywords to the ones you are striving towards on your first page. Google will like your site a lot more this way, plus that sorts out your original problem!

If you think about it, the index page is very hard to optimize for in many cases as it is very general. Say it's christmas-gifts.com. Interior pages are much easier say christmas-gifts.com/gold-ornaments.html. Beyond that, from a natural linking standpoint, someone is going to link to an article on making custom ornaments inside the site, not the index. I would think very few sites that get good natural linking get it for the index page. There are exceptions of course. News sites, portals etc.

the home page is there to "set the theme" of the website. The more detailed the page is, the easier it will be to rank high for those specific keywords as there is less competition than the generic ones from the home page.
Having said that, it is very important to have a strong landing page from where users can surf into your other pages of the website.

That also leads to mentioning good nav. There have been some threads around mentioning site maps. Google may want you to use their sitemap generator, but if you have good nav without 404's you will get crawled.That's part of the function of the index page.

Originally Posted by bill benson

That also leads to mentioning good nav. There have been some threads around mentioning site maps. Google may want you to use their sitemap generator, but if you have good nav without 404's you will get crawled.That's part of the function of the index page.

If you have a small website, I would recommend to see if natural crawlability does it for you. I've seen problems occurring because of deficient sitemap. If your website gets big, then a sitemap definitely help. There are a few tools that make sure you do not have any broken links. Let me know if you are interested, I'll post some links for you.

Most of us when optimizing a NEWLY LAUNCH website, we target first the index page; after that, we optimize the inner page (its start thru deep link web directories)

it depends on how you target and compete a particular kw on your pages....

Google does not place greater weight on the page just because a page is the home page.

Thanks for all the comments. I have optimised my inner pages for specific search terms but still the home page gets the rankings (in some cases, not all). I think this is because it is a new site and Google hasn't yet indexed the other pages. I've read about social bookmarking, blogs etc. which can spped up the process and have submitted an xml site map to Google. Is it just a case of being patient?