A few sets of stategies reported by screen reader users:

A user of Jaws said:

I tend to press "h" for a heading (skimming headings), if none are found, then search for an article name (if it is a news type site).

Otherwise I often use the 'n' key, it jumps past repeated links. It finds the thing that isn't a link, and read from there.

Another Jaws user comments:

What I do depends on what Jaws announces when the page is loaded, i.e. are there headings, and how many links there are.

If headings, I would go through heading first (skimming headings). If not, I skip the links by pressing jaws key and return, this generally starts at the content of the page.