This post explains everything you need to know about cornerstone content – or evergreen content, as it’s also known. You’ll learn what it is, why it’s important for SEO, how to write this kind of content and how you should link from your posts to your cornerstone articles.
What 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. Cornerstone articles are usually relatively long, informative articles, combining insights from different blog posts and covering everything that’s important about a certain topic.
Their focus is to provide the best and most complete information on a particular topic, rather than to sell products. Still, they should reflect your business or communicate your mission perfectly.
Cornerstone content can be either a blog post or a page. But whichever they are, you should make sure they’re very well written, update them often, and aim to get them to rank for your most competitive keywords.
Why are cornerstone articles so important for SEO?
Cornerstone content plays a significant role in any SEO strategy. It can be hard to rank for search terms that are very popular, but a cornerstone approach can help you tackle those competitive search terms. If you write a lot of articles on similar subjects, you need to tell Google which of them is the most important. If you don’t, you’ll be
eating away your own chances to rank well in the search results. Providing the correct
internal link structure between your posts tells Google which article is the most important.
Link structure for cornerstones
Cornerstone articles should have 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 you 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.
For example, I write a lot of different posts about SEO copywriting, each looking at a different aspect of SEO copywriting. The cornerstone article for this topic is the
Ultimate Guide to SEO Copywriting, and whenever I write a new post on SEO copywriting, I add a link to that cornerstone article. In doing so, I’ll make clear to Google that the Ultimate Guide is the most important article about SEO Copywriting on our site, thereby increasing its chances to rank.
Which articles are my cornerstones?
Choose your cornerstones carefully. Think of the four or five pages you would like someone to read when they first visit your website. These articles should be the cornerstones of your site. Which articles are most important to you? Which are the most complete and authoritative? Do these target the keywords you most want to rank for?
The concept of cornerstone content is so important, that our
Yoast SEO plugin includes an option to indicate whether or not an article is cornerstone content. If you mark articles as cornerstone, Yoast SEO helps you write a kick-ass article and build a solid internal linking structure.
Marking your cornerstone articles means you can create a list of them in your post overview, so you can easily work on improving them. And, most importantly, the link suggestion tool in
Yoast SEO Premium will give priority to the articles that you mark as cornerstone content, so you’ll never forget to link to your best article on a certain topic if you write about something related.
If your website is enormous, you’ll have more cornerstones than if your website is small. You’ll probably write about more than one topic, so be sure to choose a cornerstone article from each category.
Optimizing your cornerstones with Yoast SEO
Yoast SEO offers some great tools that help you optimize your cornerstone content, including a text link counter, specific cornerstone content analysis and – in Premium – even internal linking suggestions, in which cornerstone articles get priority over other posts.
Read more: How to set up a cornerstone content strategy with Yoast SEO »
Text link counter
With Yoast SEO you can filter your cornerstone articles in the post overview to see how many internal links a post has pointing to it and how many posts it links to. This
text link counter is extremely useful because you can see at a glance if your cornerstone content has enough links from other, related posts:
Cornerstone analysis
If you really want to make your cornerstone articles great, you need specific content analysis for cornerstones. Content marked as cornerstone will be judged more strictly than usual on SEO and readability in the content analysis, as you want this article to be longer, have excellent content, keep the reader’s attention and rank high. Read how
this analysis helps you optimize your cornerstones.
Internal linking suggestions
Yoast SEO Premium has an
internal linking feature. We analyze what you write and use the most prominent words in your text to determine which articles are related – and therefore which you should link to. Cornerstone articles are treated differently in our calculation of internal linking suggestions because they are more important and have a higher value. To give these articles more prominence, we place the cornerstone articles at the top of the list of the internal linking suggestions. That makes it much easier for you to link to your critical articles.
manuelaugustin
commented
6 years ago
How can we reproduce this behavior?