does linking to your own site help?

Lately I noticed some of my competitors linking from their home page(using keyword in the content) back to the home page. (It creates a loop)

Has anybody tried it?

All he is doing is including a external URL in the content. This will not do that much in regards to SEO.

People do recommend to have a external link to another website that is related to your keyword (But not exactly the KW because you do not want to be ranking another competitor).

No internal link structure works fine for extend level. He is saying to google what is his main keyword. Because when his site have a link to home page with a anchor google will know that is the main keyword for him. This worked for me to rank easily micro niche sites.

I do this in my footer throughout my all my sites. I rel=nofollow the "Home" link in my menu, making Google follow the keyword link instead. It just sets a keyword anchor for your site...not a huge help, but using "Home" as the anchor text does absolutely nothing to help your site.

I drop links randomly throughout my content back to my sites. I do it not so much for Google and internal linking structure, but because theres a ton of newbies out there with autoblogs scraping my stuff and they don't strip out the links, until they get smarter. I had one guy who was smart enough to narrow down the content to avoid the link, so I changed around where the links show up in my posts, then I had another guy ripping my posts and stripping the links so I started scattering my domains/brand names in the posts even though they aren't hotlinked, then I had another guy ripping the posts but at least he was nice enough to only post the excerpt and stick a link back. So I played nice and approved a few live trackbacks, but that guy was hitting me with pingbacks on every reblog and driving me nuts so I blocked the IP.

Anyway, the value/purpose to me is in grabbing backlinks when people scrape the content without being smart about it.

I do have the main keyword as well as other important pages with the proper anchors in the footer. This is always a good practice.