What are Cornerstone Articles?
The most important pages on your site are well written cornerstone articles. These articles directly reflect the mission of your company. You want to rank for the keywords contained in cornerstone articles. For instance, these articles can be four or five main pages of your site. Specifically, these are the top menu pages which your visitors read first. For example, a Medicare insurance site might have these top menu pages: What is Medicare, Medicare Supplements, Medicare Advantage, Medicare Part D, and Medicare Blog.
How to Write Cornerstone Articles
A cornerstone article should be lengthy articles which have essential information and regularly updated. Furthermore, cornerstone articles should be informative articles where you explain the topic to your audience. Even for e-commerce sites, cornerstone articles should be informative rather than convincing people to buy products. However, you can use cornerstone articles to send people to your product pages. The content of cornerstone articles should be focused on informing your audience.
For example, a Medicare cornerstone page informs seniors about the coverage and costs of Original Medicare. Here it makes sense to link to more specific content such as Medicare Part A and Part B. Site structure and internal linking are very important on cornerstone articles. When you write a cornerstone article always consider what other pages you could link to.
Internal Linking to Cornerstone Articles
Cornerstone Articles contain topics which you can write more specific posts about. In other words, you specific blog posts should link to your cornerstone articles. This helps search engines identify the most important articles because they have a number of inbound links. Moreover, the blog post should link the keywords you want to rank for on the cornerstone article. These are usually your long tail keywords. Consequently, cornerstone articles cover the general topic and usually contain your head keywords.
For example, a well written cornerstone article would answer lots of general questions related to your topic. For Medicare this may include premiums and deductible costs, what Medicare covers, what Medicare does not cover, and so on. Designing a good internal site structure can help you rank for more competitive head keywords. Yoast SEO Academy has a Site Structure Training class.
Digital Marketing
Keyword research is the first step to successful SEO. Your next step is to develop the content that matches these keywords. Get more information about digital marketing.
