You create internal links when you create the article. There's no reason not to. By the time your article is indexed, google has already crawled it, so it wouldn't make much sense to add them in later.
You can certainly go back and add in internal links at any time, it doesn't hurt to do that.
I'm glad you loved my content, but did you actually read it? Here's a snippet from what I said.
I went on to say that high quality content is BETTER because you'll have a more sustainable website and you'll get better engagement signals when you're on page 1. But high quality content by its self will NOT rank you.
Good domains cost $200-$1000 at auction. Design is about $50. Good initial content $20 to $100. Hosting is on average about $5/mo. So do the math on a $30 link.
Build your own pbn.
This is where the confusion lies.
Google is absolutely not looking for some sweet spot percentage which varies depending on content length. That's not a good way to analyse content.
The only time you pay attention to kw density is to make sure you haven't gone really high, but it does not play any role in ranking.
There's no difference in the way you will rank a 2000 word article compared with a 4000 word article.
The 4000 shouldn't have double the keywords of the 2000.
They both need a certain amount of exposure to the main keyword group otherwise google will just not consider it relevant. People who are ranking with just the main title in the keyword and think that's all you need are not understanding the algorithm. If all you needed was the keyword in the title and high quality content, then on-page seo wouldn't even exist. Google would essentially be a near human level AI that could look at a title and say "Ok, this is about X", then read the article and conclude "This is a high quality article about X, with good information." It cannot do this.
So how does it rank pages?
Is it so simple that all it does is look for the keyword in the title? The notion of that is ridiculous. If so, then what's next? To rank based on what has better backlinks?
Or does it just look for a keyword density for 1 keyword? That also is incredibly simplistic.
The first thing you need to understand is google does not rank keyword. It ranks pages.
It's not looking at your page and considering for keyword X, and then doing a kw density check.
It's looking at your page, and it's building a sort of graph data structure of that page, with weighting values for different keywords.
It then knows, from the rank graph, how those keywords relate, because they themselves have weights of relevancy towards each other, so it understands "topics". This is what hummingbird was. That's when we had the shift of ranking for keywords, to ranking for topics. In the past "best toasters", would be considered different from "toaster reviews".
So once it's built that data structure of your page, it then has an understanding of where your page fits and what it should rank for.
After that, they then look at other pages on your site and they will create another sort of graph data structure with weighting values for different topics. This is why it's hard to rank a site if you create a whole load of unrelated content. They are more likely to rank your "how to walk your dog" article, if you have other pages that have topical relevancy related to dogs, dog training, dog walking, dog behavior and so on.
As part of this, they are also looking at your internal anchor text. It's a very easy way to help understand what a page is about. They used to do this with external anchor text, but it was too easy to manipulate, so penguin came into play. External anchors still help, but if you trigger an unnatural link building(via penguin) filter then they will(and this is from patents) reduce the effect of certain links, because they consider those links to be unnatural. They are constantly looking at your links and trying to determine "is this natural". If the answer is "yes", then you get juice, if it's "no", then they reduce the juice passed.
So in summary, to optimize pages, it's not about the actual density, it's about how often you are using the keywords, where you're using them AND the topics on the page.
Let me give you an example of how you would correctly optimize a page.
Let's go for a keyword to start "laptops for nursing students"
In fact. I'm going to write this in a separate article, because it's going to get lost here.
