On your site, you’ll probably have a number of articles that are most dear to your heart. Articles you really want people to read. Articles you want people to find with Google. At Yoast, we call these articles your cornerstone articles. How do you make sure these articles pop up in a high position in the search engines? And how could the Yoast SEO plugin help you set up a cornerstone content strategy? I’ll tell you all about that in this blog post.
What is cornerstone content?
Cornerstone content are those articles that you’re most proud of. The articles that reflect the mission of your company and the ones you definitely want to rank for. In general, cornerstone content are lengthy articles and they tend to be informative.
Perhaps you’ve never put much thought in using a cornerstone content strategy. It is worth your time though. Think about the blog posts on your site. Which articles are most precious to you? Which articles are the most complete and authoritative? Choose these to be your cornerstone content.
Read more: ‘What is cornerstone content?’ »
What does Yoast SEO do with cornerstone content?
Two things are important for a successful cornerstone content approach:
- Cornerstone content should be lengthy, well-written and well-optimized articles.
- Cornerstone articles should have a prominent place in your site’s structure.
Yoast SEO will help you take care of both of these things!
1. Write awesome articles
The SEO and readability analysis in Yoast SEO will give you feedback on your writing. If you consider a post to be one of your cornerstone content articles, you should check the box ‘this article is cornerstone content’ beneath the focus keyword input field.
Indicating that an article is cornerstone content, will make the SEO analysis and the readability analysis a bit more strict. For example, we propose to write at least 300 words for a normal post. If a post is cornerstone content, we want you to write at least 900 words.
Our SEO analysis will help you optimize your blog post for the search engines. For cornerstone content, you have to go the extra mile. Make sure you use the focus keyword enough, mention your focus keyword in a few headings and optimize your pictures. Readability is equally important though. Our readability analysis helps you to, for instance, use enough headings and to write in short, easy to read sentences and paragraphs.
Keep reading: ‘How our cornerstone analysis helps you create your best articles’ »
2. Incorporate cornerstone content in your site structure
You have to link to your cornerstone articles to make them rank high in the search engines. By linking to your favorite articles, you’ll tell Google that these are the ones that are most important. That way, you won’t be competing with your own content for a place in the search engines.
Yoast SEO can help you link to your cornerstone content articles. If you use our premium plugin, you can use our internal linking tool. This tool will make linking suggestions for other posts based on the words you’re using in your post. The posts you’ve marked as cornerstone content articles – as described previously – will always appear on top of our list of suggestions. That way, whenever you’re writing about a specific topic, you’ll find the right cornerstone article to link to.
Using our internal linking tool will remind you to link to your cornerstones whenever you’re writing a new post. As a result, your cornerstones will stay on top in your linking structure. And that’s what they need to start ranking.
Read on: ‘How to incorporate cornerstone content?’ »
Cornerstone content strategy made simple with Yoast SEO
Your cornerstone content strategy consist of two elements. Your cornerstone content articles should be informative, nice to read and well-optimized. In addition to that, they should have a prominent place in your site’s structure. Yoast SEO helps you carry out both these things.
Don’t forget! You should update your cornerstone articles once in a while. On the post overview page of your WordPress install, you can use Yoast SEO to filter out your cornerstones. It’s a good idea to browse through these most precious articles every other month. Just make sure these articles are still up-to-date and get enough links. They deserve that little bit of extra attention!