After playing with SEO strategies a bit with my own LL I've come to the general conclusion that the best strategy is to get and give traffic as best you can. If you plan to send most of your traffic to submits from a category page then send all the traffic you can to that category page. The more traffic you send submitters the better will be your submitters.
Also, I've had faster/easier results with deep linking for non-domain related keywords. Root level linking seems to be less sticky for me on sites where's there's no constant flow of fresh content.
