Cornerstone content is the articles or content that you value the most. It usually reflects your business and mission and they are very well written. This is the content that you want your visitors to read first. This is also content that you want to rank very high for in search results.
Choosing Your Cornerstones
This will be four or five pages (larger websites may have more) that you deem important to your business so choose them carefully. They should be complete, authoritative and use keywords that you want to rank for. This content needs to be your very best.
How to Build Your Cornerstones
- Conduct extensive keyword research and identify the ones that work for your business.
- Write awesome content that includes those keywords.
- Choose the best content that you just created.
- Rewrite your content and make more awesome.
- Use long tail variants of your keywords to maximize your content’s visibility.
As you can see the underlying theme is quality content, good keywords that have a high search volume and a relatively low difficulty for ranking, and finally a solid linking structure that defines which posts will serve as your cornerstone content. A solid SEO strategy can bring the traffic you need to succeed and crush the competition.
Cornerstone Articles are Important for SEO
This content plays a significant role in your SEO strategy. Using the cornerstone approach can help you rank for competitive keywords that are difficult to rank for. If you write a lot of blogs or content that is like your cornerstone content, proper linking will tell Google which ones are your cornerstones. Think of a pyramid and the cornerstone towards the top and the other relevant content is towards the bottom. The cornerstones should have links on your home page and then similar content is linked to the cornerstones.
When someone is reading your cornerstone content page and they are engaged with the material therefore, they may want to read more. If your site has more content that is similar but it is not linked to the cornerstone the visitor may never see it. Therefore, all relevant content must available from this location. This is where internal linking comes into play. The linking content must be easy to see because you want the user to be engaged. As you can see it is not only for the search engine’s benefit but more specifically for your website’s visitors.
Conclusion
We all want our websites to have a lot of traffic that converts. Understanding what your visitors are looking for does not usually require a crystal ball. You know what your sites content is so any visitor that is engaged with your content is interested in that subject. It makes sense then to make all that type of content highly visible and easily located from the cornerstone content page. Taking this approach you do not have to be a psychic just know that someone that likes specific content will most likely want more of it.