An Introduction To Cornerstone Content

A Practical Guide to Cornerstone Content & It's Impact on SEOAt the heart of your website is what’s known as cornerstone content. These are the posts that you want to see rank the highest on the search results pages (SERPs). Therefore they’re relatively long and informative with the goal of providing complete information about a topic. Whether you choose to create a page or a blog post for this content, there are a few things you should know.

Why Cornerstone Content is Important

This content plays a major role in your SEO strategy. Although it’s challenging to rank for popular search terms, with cornerstone content you have a better chance of doing so. Here’s your opportunity to tell Google which of your pages about similar topics is the most important. If you don’t do this you’re less likely to do well in the SERPs.

How to Create Great Cornerstone Content

The amount of time you put into creating this content is up to you. If you don’t have much time and you’ve already created lots of articles, here’s what you can do.

1. Choose Your Keywords

Determine what keywords you most want to rank for. You’ll want to optimize your cornerstone posts as the “head” of this content.

2. Choose Your Best Post

Once you know what keyword you’re after, look through the posts you’ve already written for the keyword. Make sure to choose your best post. This will become your “tail” post.

3. Rewrite Your Best Post

Update this article to ensure it’s SEO friendly and readable. As you expand and update your article you’ll want to use lots of headings. In fact, add a note to your calendar to update it frequently.

4. Optimize Tail Posts for Long-Tail Keywords

Now, look through the other blog posts you’ve written about this topic. Update these posts making sure that they’re optimized for your long-tail keywords (variants of the keyword you’ve used in your head post).

5. Link Tail Posts to Cornerstone Posts

Now it’s time to inform Google about your head post and its importance. To do this you’ll want to link all of your tail articles to it.

How to Optimize Cornerstone Posts with Yoast

One of the tools you can use to help you with the creation of your cornerstone content is Yoast. This is a plugin that you can add to your WordPress blog. Once there it’ll help you in several ways.

1. Analyze Your Content for SEO

To create great SEO content you’ll need a way to analyze it. Remember, your head is judged more strictly than usual. Not only does it need to be readable, but it also needs to be longer, contain great content, hold the reader’s attention, and rank highly in the SERPs.

2. Count Your Text Links

In Yoast’s post overview, you can see the number of internal links your post has pointing to it. You’ll also see how many posts link to it. This is very useful information because it tells you if you have enough links.

3. Create Internal Links

There’s also an internal linking feature in Yoast Premium. This feature analyzes what you write to find the most prominent words and any articles that use these keywords so you know what to link to. Cornerstone articles are given more prominence so Yoast places them at the top of the list of suggestions.

Conclusion

One thing that we can all learn from the creation of cornerstone content is the importance of site structure for SEO. When you’ve created a solid site structure everyone (both readers and visitors alike) is happy because they can easily navigate your website. Affordable Dental SEO in Tampa Bay, FL is here to help you with this so contact us today.