Cornerstone articles provide an essential SEO role in your overall website strategy. They’re designed to be the first port of call for your website visitors, providing crucial information about what you and your business are about – your key reason for why you do what you do.
"However, lots of websites still don’t have cornerstone articles on them. For many businesses, these longer articles are time consuming and still a bit of mystery. Here’s why you need them and how they impact on your overall SEO strategy."
Choose your cornerstone articles carefully
Cornerstone articles are the most important articles, those ones you’re most proud of – the ones that you recommend absolutely every website visitor sees. Ideally, you’ll want 4 – 5 cornerstone articles, however, the bigger the site, the more cornerstone articles you may have. They’re ideally created as static pages rather than blog posts, as the information on the isn’t likely to change, plus it helps to keep them high in the overall hierarchy of your site.
Reserve your most important keywords for your cornerstone articles
These are your main keywords, any other pages and blogs you write, ideally will use similar and linking keywords, but not exactly the same ones as this cornerstone article. This helps prevent your other blog posts and articles competing for those search results. It also helps highlight to Google and the other search engines, which articles to use for your SEO ranking.
Cornerstone articles are Informative articles pages
Cornerstone articles are based on those things your target audience need to know about you, your business and your site. They’re articles that highlight your most important information. Look to answer why they should be spending time on your site, what they’re going to learn and how you can help them solve their biggest issues and problems in your niche area.
They’re not focused on getting sales – more pointing out the uniqueness of your products and/or services. As these articles are meant to give answers to those critical problems and issues, they’re usually longer than the average blog post or article. You therefore need to make sure you break up the text within them, with images and subheadings, videos and graphics, quotes and tweets.
Link to them from your home page
Ideally need to be clickable from your home page. After all, these are the most important articles you want your visitors to see. Think of your cornerstone articles as the central hub for all other blogs and pages related to that content. They’re the home page of that subject keyword – and everything else is an expansion of the topic.
Link to them from your other pages and blog posts
Having several articles linking back to a page will highlight the importance and authority of that page. You could also use a plugin (such as Yoast SEO) to help highlight suggestions on which blog posts to link back to that page, if you have a lot of content.
Promote your cornerstone article
Cornerstone articles are the ones you promote, as you want to encourage shares, views and comments on them – as this helps highlight how important they are. If you’ve done a good job with your cornerstone articles, other sites will naturally want to share and link to them too, further enhancing their importance.
Cornerstone articles are an essential part of your SEO strategy and, with the information above, you’ll be able to start implementing them on your site. If you’d rather get personalised help with your SEO strategy, why not get in touch? We can offer you a free initial consultation and discuss your options for moving your SEO forward!