I am about ready to start putting content on my site. I need to write an informative site that gets me great SEO and placement. First, I have a page called Recommended Sites with PR. I want Recommended Sites page to help elevate the home page as well as send traffic to the home page. Question 1: Does linking from this internal page to the home page help the home page's ranking. If so, are there any thumbrules to tell us the optimized amount of links to use. 2. Is it necessary to have to link from the home page to Recommended Sites or can I use a sitemap linked to the homepage and RS linked to that?

1. i think linking to your home page from your internal page with PR will help your home page.
2. it may not be necessary to link to recommended sites from home page.
it may be linked from some other pages as well.

I'm not sure that linking from your internal pages will help your PR. I have tried to do that but i had no improvement with Google. At the contrary I have seen that it works quite well with MSN.