What is a better use of link building between these two strategies:

Gain link exchanges with anchor text of your targeted keyword for one targeted term for your main homepage.

or

Gain link exchanges with anchor text of many targeted keyterms for your internal pages to help each page rank individually.

Does incoming links regardless of anchor text to your main page provide enough PR ranking to make your internal pages rank better based on PR and proper on page factors?

None of the above. The best use of your link building time is to build content worth linking to, and then get others to do so.

One way = traffic to your site, no traffic going the other way.
Two way = traffic to and from your site.

One = 1 = 1st.
Two = 2 = 2nd.

Would you rather be 1st or 2nd?

Originally Posted by ADAM Web Design

None of the above. The best use of your link building time is to build content worth linking to, and then get others to do so.

And if that's off the table, or we're doing democracy American style, with a two party system, we need a contender. So short of spending the time building quality content, spend the time with your family not worrying about your web site.

Link exchanges carry little weight in Google, and people tend to cheat them. You'll find a lot of cloaking, where if you're GoogleBot it's not a real hyperlink, but a javacript, but if you use a normal web browser it's a link.

I started down the whole link exchange software route and ended up having links from sites as varied as "lose weight by drinking this wonder liquid made from crushed sea horses" to "holiday homes in war zones"

I was linked by everything from hair restorers, wonder pills, escort services, become a zillionaire ebooks, blogs about my dog/cat/pony etc, etc, etc

Consequently, a lot of time and effort was wasted.

Though it was fascinating to see what sites are out there on the fringe!

Strangely, there were many, many plastic surgery type sites - surely there can't be that many practitioners?!

In a nutshell - good relevant backlinks to quality well written content.

And the more hair restorer sites you link to, the more suspect your site will become (at least to google) - that's assuming you're not selling hair restorer

Originally Posted by dexityimages

Does incoming links regardless of anchor text to your main page provide enough PR ranking to make your internal pages rank better based on PR and proper on page factors?

PR value has very little to do with keyword search rankings. How often do you see PR0 sites/pages listed No.1 at Google? I have seen them everyday. If you are focusing on increasing PR, any links you put out there will help. If you are focusing on keyword rankings, you will need to have solid links with good anchor texts embedded in the links.