Understanding the Significance of Cornerstone Content in SEO
When building and growing your business website, it is important to have cornerstone content. In general, cornerstone content can be referred to as the articles on your website in which you have the greatest pride.
These content pieces present the best image of your company online. They reflect the nature of your business and communicate your mission and goals to the customers. In addition, they are well-written and professional, ensuring that the readers have a good impression of your commercial operations.
When people search the web, the cornerstone content is the most desirable for higher ranking. The pertinent articles will draw more attention and have a greater impact than your regular materials. Also, these articles are often designed as explainers. Therefore, they combine materials from your other blog posts on your website. The combined insights can help visitors understand your business or at least, make them curious enough to keep exploring.
In this article, you will gain comprehensive knowledge on cornerstone content. You will learn the basics of cornerstone content, its importance in search engine optimization and how to write and promote your cornerstone articles.
Identifying Your Cornerstone Content
If you are interested in advancing your site through building cornerstone content, you must first identify some of your best articles. These will form part of the foundation for your SEO strategy. When choosing your ideal articles, you must evaluate your content with care. Ideally, you should find about four or five pages which you would like your visitors to read when visiting your website. Your choices will form the cornerstone for your website. There are multiple questions you can pose to yourself for optimal selection.
- Which of your current articles on your site are most valuable or precious in your eyes?
- Which of your pages are the most authoritative for your business and field?
- Which of the content in your website provides a complete view of your business?
Your cornerstone articles should also include keywords that you would like to rank better for on the search engine results.
If you are using an SEO tool for your website, you might find useful features that can help you advance your cornerstone content strategy. For instance, the tool might ask you to select articles based on whether you consider them to be cornerstone material or not. When you mark the high quality article, the SEO tools will help you ensure that they are always prioritized. In simple terms, you will be able to access the posts with ease for faster editing and general improvement.
When you identify your cornerstone articles, they will always be easily accessible. Therefore, you will be unlikely to forget about them when working on your website. If you have an enormous website for your operations, you will need to have more articles as your cornerstone content. You can create materials for each category of your business and write a high level article for each.
The Importance of Cornerstone Content in SEO
Cornerstone is an important element to consider when implementing your SEO strategy. In general, it is difficult to rank well if you are dealing with competitive terms. The cornerstone approach will let you focus your search engine efforts in one place with your most valuable keywords. Google will recognize the specific ranking of your articles and prioritize the cornerstone ones. As a result, you will be able to rank higher. In other cases, all your content will be competing and this is inefficient.
The most important method to help search engines such as Google recognize your core content is by using a good internal linking structure in your website.
Linking Structures
When structuring your website, your cornerstone content should be high on the pyramid. In ideal situations, the visitors should be able to access these articles from the home page directly. In addition, they should be able to get to the content when reading other posts. Basically, a cornerstone article is comprehensive, so you will most likely write other posts focusing on different issues related to the core material. You should link your cornerstone articles to the secondary blog content. This internal linking will increase the rank level of the cornerstone material on your website. Subsequently, the search engines will be able to find your best pages with ease.
Content Type for Cornerstone Pages
In ideal situations, your cornerstone content should be on content pages. It is possible to make it a blog post but it is best to make a page after the post. The articles on your pages must remain relevant to your audience. Therefore, you should make sure that the material is updated regularly. Also, this content should be focused on explaining. Therefore, you should make certain that the material provides the best information on the topic. In addition, you should incorporate your best keywords for superlative ranking on search results pages.
You should note that cornerstone articles are meant to be long and informative. Therefore, you should be able to give a detailed and high-level overview on your topic. In simple terms, everything important should be covered. The creation of the material requires good writing skills. Lengthy articles are harder to read than shorter alternatives. Therefore, you should make use of good subheadings to divide the content into digestible sections. You can also install an index at the beginning of the long article for easier navigation.
Simple Guidelines on Developing a Practical Approach
If you are building a new website, you will need to research on your keywords for your cornerstone strategy. After that, you can use the material that you have found to develop long, informative and beautiful articles for your pages. Unfortunately, this is only an idealistic approach. Chances are, you already have well-written articles on your website. In addition, you might not have the time or resources to clear and build your content afresh. If this is your case, consider using these simple guidelines for a practical cornerstone approach.
Choose the Best Keywords
When planning to improve your cornerstone articles, you should choose the most appropriate and essential keywords. These are the core keywords that you want to rank for in Google search results. Your articles should be optimized for the most competitive or valuable keywords for your business. You can use specialized research tools to identify the best choices.
Look for Your Cornerstone Posts
Once you have identified your keywords, you should look for an appropriate article to turn into your cornerstone article. The post should be written while including most of your identified keywords or at least, related ones. The article should be fairly informative on an important topic on your website. In addition, it should be pleasing; you should think that it is one of your best. This will be your cornerstone piece.
Rewrite Your Article
Even if you selected article is great, you should attempt to make it better. Chances are that it was written a long-time ago, and it might be no longer ideal in terms of writing style, and the information might not be complete. Therefore, rewrite the content as you deem appropriate. Make it more catchy and readable by your website guests and optimize it for SEO.
You should include the keywords that you found through research into the article. Also, expand the content to incorporate more information, and make sure that the material is up to date for correctness. Remember, you will have to rewrite and edit your cornerstone article once in a while as your website and business grow and change.
Optimize Other Posts
Once you have upgraded your chosen cornerstone post, you will have to deal with the rest of your content. You should find your other blog posts which are related to your cornerstone article topic. Then, rewrite or edit to optimize them. This process involves the inclusion of long tail variant keywords which are related to your core keywords in the cornerstone content. You can use your keyword research tool if you are not certain about the best long tail variants.
Link the Articles
Finally, you should help Google and other search engines identify the main articles in your website for better ranking. This involves creating an internal linking structure which connects your cornerstone article to the related blog posts. Basically, create a link in your blog posts within your long tail keywords such that it goes to your cornerstone articles.
These guidelines on improving your website SEO through the cornerstone approach are simple and practical. As long as they are implemented well, you will see a significant improvement in the performance of your website.
Conclusion
The most important point that you should remember with regard to cornerstone content is that site structure is critical for search engine optimization. You might currently have the right content to elevate your status, but if it is poorly organized, your results will not be ideal. Improving your structure will help search engines find your important content faster.
