I thought I'd use a case study to demonstrate the value of internal dynamic linking.
If you google the keyword "make money online" (a major keyword that gets 246,000 searches a month according to Google's External Keyword Tool set on "exact" match), you will find a page from About.com ranking second (see the image above - click to enlarge it).
Here's the page url:
entrepreneurs.about.com/od/homebasedbusiness/a/makemoneyonline.htm
But how has it managed to rank in the way it has for such a competitive keyword?
If you check Yahoo's Site Explorer for backlinks, the page has only 3536 backlinks of which only 1269 are external to the domain - some of the competitors for this keyword have over 10,000 backlinks, and some over 20,000 backlinks. The real secret to it's ranking is from the 2267 internal links.
For instance, one of the internal links, anchored on the term "make money online", is
entrepreneurs.about.com/
And exploring the backlinks to that url shows that it has a staggering 95357 backlinks (see the image below - click to enlarge it), including a link from the home page, about.com, which is pagerank 8 and has a staggering 3,171,374 backlinks (of which only 378,493 are external links).
What about.com has done is create a giant site full of content, and has cleverly anchor-linked all the internal pages so strength flows from page to page. They always use anchor text when hyperlinking, and the repeated use of certain anchors make pages hyperlinked on those anchors surge upwards the search rankings.
Wikipedia ranks in the SERPs for a similar reason.
The thing is, you too can use internal linking to get certain pages to rank in the SERPs. Of course to have an about.com effect, you will need a lot of content - but in smaller niches, some 1500 to 2000 pages are sufficient to get you to the top if you link internally in an intelligent and persistant way. Make certain pages powerful, and then use them to send links to your money pages so that you rank for them
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