THE ULTIMATE GUIDE TO CREATING CORNERSTONE CONTENT

 ‘Twas just an outline of cornerstone content, below we are going to demonstrate in detail that what the heck is cornerstone content, why cornerstone content is relevant for the websites and what are the significant examples of cornerstone content, and so on.

Let's Dive In...

What the heck is “Cornerstone Content”?

“Cornerstone content” is the core of your website. It consists of the best, most important articles on your site; the pages or posts you want to rank highest in the search engines. It's a high-value, foundation piece of content that is intended to help you start building traffic. In paraphrasing, that’s what Google wants you to do with the content on your site.

What do you think about Yoast’s cornerstone content plugin? "Cornerstone Content" is a WordPress feature proffered by Yoast SEO to heighten organic search results for more competing keyword phrases that might otherwise be tough to grasp. If we talk about the cornerstone articles then such articles are usually relatively long, informative articles, consolidating insights from different blog posts and enveloping everything crucial about a specified topic.  

Why Cornerstone Content is relevant for SEO?

The cornerstone content (and internal linking) impersonates a big role in your overall SEO strategy. Cornerstone is a basic, crucial, indispensable, and the chief foundation upon which something is developed or formed. Now, you might be thinking about internal linking, or what the heck is internal linking?

Right?

Well, here we'll tell you what is internal linking. Internal linking is when you highlight anchor text and add a 'do follow' link (URL) to that specific text. The link that already exists on your website, it is old content, which you have already published- this executes it as an internal link. Moreover, providing accurate linking between your posts tells Google which article is the most important or Which articles on your website are the most authoritative?

Here, you've probably got a few pages on your website that you actually want people to simply land on and devour when they first hit your website. Are these articles written regarding the keywords you want to rank for? Then these articles are the cornerstones or the pillars of your website.

Link structure for Cornerstone

Cornerstone articles or content should hold a prominent place on your website. Ideally, someone should be able to click straight from your homepage to your cornerstone articles. Also, all your other posts about similar topics should link back to their corresponding cornerstone article, so its importance is clear from your site structure. As your site develops, you will write tons of new blog posts approaching that topic from other angles, each one linking back to your cornerstone article.

This internal linking structure will increase the chance of your cornerstone content articles ranking in Google searches. Still, writing an article about a specific topic often leads to inspiration to write an article about a similar topic.    

Benefits of Cornerstone Content

Here, the 'Cornerstone content' is quite the ultimate, overarching introductory material regarding a core theme of your own businesses and that can simply act as a gateway to other articles or content on the same topic. Cornerstone content is the most prominent or fundamental thing that can be found on the websites that you've created.  

There are several benefits of creating cornerstone content subsuming:

1. Increasing brand awareness
2. Creating a positive first impression
3. Driving relevant website traffic
4. Establishing authority and trust
5. Feeding your funnel.  
   

Moreover, cornerstone content is one of the most important tools for your SEO procedure or strategy. It often isn't easy to rank for search terms that are extremely popular. By implementing the cornerstone approach, you can simply tackle those search terms and come out ahead of the competition. If your site has a lot of content on a similar subject, you need to make sure Google knows which content is the most important and which one isn't. Otherwise, you could end up competing with your own content. By providing the proper linking structure in your posts, you can easily let Google know which article is important and help get it on the top of the search engines.    

Steps to create your cornerstone content

Choosing the right content for your cornerstone page on your website is an important exercise. Don’t just dive into your blog and pull out any content. Determine what would be valuable to visitors who come to your website for the first time. Then put in the time and effort to create a quality piece.  

1. Choose your topic: Look for something that people often search for in your area of expertise but are not finding satisfying results. As an example, if you are a professional organizer, you could create a valuable guide on “how to downsize with dignity”. Make the topic something so relevant to those searching, they have no choice but to click on your content page.
2. Choose your format: Not all content has to be written text. You could choose to create your content in other formats such as an infographic or an app.
3. Research your keyword:  We all have been taught to select the long-tail keywords when we are optimizing your pages and posts. The reason is that we have a better rank higher when the phase is more specific.
4. Write the content: If you have been blogging for a while, you may have content already written that could be combined, updated, and published as a cornerstone page. Otherwise, you will need to take some time to write the content. For important content like this, you may want to hire a writer to help you. Consider these pages on your website as an investment in your business. Don’t forget to include a call-to-action on your cornerstone page.
5. Optimize your content: Optimization shouldn’t cease at keyword incorporation. There are many steps you can take to optimize your content for SEO, social media, and action. For SEO, optimization should continue with optimizing headlines, images, and supplementary text (if your chosen format is a video or infographic).  
   

But once in a while, you've taken that down, you also need to make it really easy for individuals to share your content. Get some social buttons on there so people can share it with one click. There are a myriad of plugins available to make this quite easy, and if you have the resources you can customize or create your own. Keep the below buttons apparent.

Final Words:

Now, we hope this blog post cleared up this subject for you and made completing this strategy easier if only a little. As 'cornerstone content' can be quite an intimidating SEO strategy to tackle as it takes a hell of a lot of time and effort and is nowhere close to being an instantaneous solution.