When you exchange links or submit your website to directories you want to link to as many pages on your site as possible as this will tell search engines that you have a lot of good and worthwhile content. If you have all links pointing to your homepage it will tell search engine that your site is very shallow and they might think that the links were created with some automation software instead of naturally (organic).
Use keywords in Anchor text of your links but you definitely don’t want all your incoming links to look the same, because that also looks like automation and you might get red flagged by Google. SEO Tip: Use your website URL sometimes, your company name other times and different but related keywords in anchor text of inbound links.
Getting as many as possible inbound links have become #1 priority in SEO world as that will get your website higher Page Rank and therefore higher rankings in Search results. There are different links you can acquire: Reciprocal and One Way links. One way links are by far better and much harder to get but any link you can get to point to your website is better than none. To get free one way links I use Free tools like Directory submitter and Article Submitter .