For me, the most success has been a dynamic homepage. Latest posts, along with favorite posts, categories, and pages. I have mine pleasantly filled with just about everything important.
So far this technique has worked great. Along with that I have NO Adsense on the homepage. And I don't need it because almost all of my traffic comes from individual pages, not my home page. That is because a lot of my individual posts and pages rank on the first page for their keywords.
Hope that helps. Besides having great content just have a nice number of backlinks to your homepage for the keyword you're targeting, but also use others you are atleast going to attempt to target. Looks more natural. Blog posting, forums and guest post. Best way IMO. Don't expect much until you have a lot of content.