decaff - 4:11 pm on Mar 8, 2005 (gmt 0)

"Er, well we found out a while back that links are also good for people to use to actually click through to our site... You know, traffic? Customers? :P"

This should always be your first consideration when researching and acquiring links...links preclude the search engines historically for traffic and business development...

The search engines have only in the last 4 - 5 years factored in links as a ranking variable..(with Google setting the standards on this)

Deep linking will surely benefit you for targeted traffic from the links themselves and for strengthening your site(s) for their particular theme/authority and for possibly bringing even more interior pages into play in the SERPs..

Regarding how you should implement from a timing perspective...I am not sure you will benefit and could even evoke a penalty if all the 3K-4K worth of links show up at the same time...