Welcome to the Q&A Forum

You can also use the free program cuterank. It works okay and if you buy it you may produce the reports as wel.

I wonder if there is a minimum number of external links you should have. I have many scoring articles that do not contain any outbound link. I think your site in total should have outbound links but not specifically per article. Or else I should not be able to rank at all.

You should take a look at CuteRank. This tool is free and if you run it once daily you can see the keyword ranking over time. It will save history and will draw easy graphs to see how you are doing.