A sure way to advance your company’s website and prove its authority online is by adding some quality cornerstone content to the main pages of your website. Cornerstone content is comprised of well-written articles, also called cornerstone articles, that are used to help people quickly understand what you’re all about when they enter your site and keep their attention until they have been made aware of your services and products.
What Should A Cornerstone Article Include?
Cornerstone articles are typically longer than or at least 2000 words long. They are well-written and contain in-depth, valuable information. These articles increase the rank and value of your site because of how informative they are; thus, increasing your SEO or Search Engine Optimization. The more research that is done prior to writing the article, the more value it has. You can also add other forms of related media to the post like images, infographics, relevant data, and statistics, etc. to further increase that value. The length of the article itself will also play a part because of the amount of details that need to be included. So, find a writer that can and will meet all these requirements, as they play a key role in the growth and expansion of your business.
Have the writer incorporate internal links in the article that will lead people to other related pages on the same website and external links to outside podcasts, videos, or websites. Another good internal link to have would be to user-generated content, like comments and reviews made by people that have either previously been on the site or that have done business with you and are willing to put in a good word to help you obtain new clients and readers. Anything important they say about your business will be helpful in building a good reputation amongst your competitors.
What Does Cornerstone Content Provide?
It provides a general understanding of your business and simple site navigation, meaning it should be quick and easy for someone to find things on your website. Create some sort of plan to make this happen; consider drawing diagrams of the exact way you want everything to be connected. All the articles, pages, media, and links should be set up in a way that makes sense and causes the least amount of confusion for new visitors of the site.
Where to Place Your Cornerstone Articles
After typing in the URL, the first page that should pop up is the home page. On that home page is where there should either be brief snapshots of your cornerstone articles, or easily-accessible links to them at the top of the page; or both. And then, somewhere included in the articles themselves, should be direct links to other pages on the site. That way it’s not necessary to go all the way back to the homepage just to access the service or product being talked about in the cornerstone article; instead, you’ll just be taken straight to it. Make it to where the minimal number of clicks is required by the navigator. The idea is that the person will, one way or another, be ultimately led to the different topics on your website through your cornerstone content.
Each one of these articles is dedicated and linked to the respective keywords associated with the site. The whole written article should center its focus on that keyword. The reader is supposed to be able to get a general understanding of the topic from that one article before they even go deeper into the site’s network.
We can’t stress enough the dire importance of cornerstone content. They play a key role in SEO. The articles themselves are also called pillar articles just because of such a sturdy foundation of understanding they form for your site. It’s important to always keep the pillar articles updated and frequently checked for duplicate links that might occur. Everything could fall apart if you lose that foundation.
Organization is key. Continue to build the rest of the site systematically as it grows bigger so that it is always easy to follow, and don’t change that system unless you absolutely have to. Otherwise, you could lose track of everything. If any backlinks are misplaced, duplicated, or are just hard to find, how do you expect search engines to find them? If this happens, the website will begin to lose its authority. Loss of authority means loss of business connections. If you no longer have your reputation and you clearly can’t keep up with site maintenance, your partners might start doubting your trustworthiness and professionalism. It’s not unreasonable for them to start placing less and less faith in your partnership together.
Keyword and SERP Rank
Think about the main focus or idea that you want your business to be known for. What ideas are included in your mission statement? What top 5 keywords perfectly give an overall description of the services and products you provide?
Having the keywords individually linked to these articles will help Google and other search engines find the website and rank it higher in the search engine results pages (SERPs). Search engines don’t actually rank the entire website though; they rank the pages themselves. The articles included, and the backlinks associated with them are also used to calculate rank. All these items are to be set up correctly to improve your rank and authority.
In Conclusion
There are a lot of benefits that come with using and maintaining cornerstone content, and it creates a lot of value for your site. It boosts your SEO and in general, makes your business’s website much more interesting to a variety of different ages of people. If you’re able to reach a bigger audience through these articles, you could potentially gain a lot more customers than the amount you had before.
It’s a pretty simple process. Use this article as a reference when planning for your cornerstone content and find a journalist that will execute the plan in the best way possible.
