Where to place seo optimised articles? Help Needed

Hi there,

I am currently preparing 50 seo articles, each one focusing on a separate long tail keyword. I hope that the articles will help me increase the relevancy of my site for my target keywords and also I hope I get found on the search engines for a few a of them

My question is, where can I put them on my site to give them maximum seo exposure?

Just to explain, I assuming (please let me know if I am wrong) that google would prefer something like

mydomain.com/my-keyword-rich-article.html (as that would only be 1 page deep).

As opposed to mydomain.com/articles/my-keyword-rich-article.html (as that would be 2 pages deep).

Now ideally I would like to put links to these articles at the bottom of my homepage. However if you have a look at my site (check sig) you will see that I already have about 8 links to other articles.

However I understand that it would not be good to add another 50 links at the bottom of my homepage. Is this correct?

Really I am looking to maximise the effectiveness of these articles, so would really appreciate any advise on where to put them.

thanks