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I don't think any benchmark exists. Obviously, a lot more people look at a New York Times article, at least the writer hopes so, then look at an individual home for sale. In addition, who's the audience? A NYT article that appeals to a social media savvy audience will have more shares than an article geared towards a less social audience. Same with your home for sale. Is it in Palo Alto or Bozeman, Montana? Any benchmark would be useless.

Internal links should be on the same page, for the most part. The exception, like Emily, said, would be if the link is unrelated and you want them to come back to the original content (e.g. opt-in landing page linked from a blog post). External links in a new tab!  For example, this is a link (opens in a new window)  And External Link ( Visit Website )

That's it! No need to submit your sitemap to any other search engine.

Thanks Robert, I am talking about scenarios when our site has two pages coming up in rankings results but the first one is less relevant than the second. It sounds like the ideas in the Moz article from 2010 are still true. The search results are appearing in a particular order because the search engine is getting more powerful signals from the less relevant page for one reason or another and we need to intelligently dissect the content and ranking signals on both pages to understand what might be happening. Thanks!