Two weeks ago, I wrote a post focussing on the question of the type of content of cornerstone articles. I concluded with the notion that cornerstone content should be informative, fun to read and extremely well written. Cornerstone articles should reflect your business or the mission of your business.
Once you have written such awesome content, you would like search engines to notice these pages. You should thus make sure your internal linking structure shows Google that your cornerstone page is most important. But how do you do that? How do you make sure your cornerstone pages actually rank?
Incorporating cornerstone content in your website
In this post, I will focus on the question how to incorporate your cornerstone pages in your site structure. I will first describe the most ideal position of your cornerstone content in the structure of your website. I truly understand that for most of you, this will mean a drastic change in the structure of your current website. That’s why I will also give some tips (quick wins) to optimize your site structure quickly.
High in your pyramid!
Cornerstone articles should appear very high in your site’s pyramid. Ideally, one would be able to instantly click from your homepage to your cornerstone contentpage. Ideally you would write an awesome cornerstone article and link all your other pages about similar topics to that article. You should make sure that every one of those articles contains beautifully written prose nicely focussing on different aspects of the same keyword you are aiming to rank for with your cornerstone article. Subsequently, you will write a million new blogposts focussing on new angles of the topic of your cornerstone article. From every single one of these million blogposts, you link to your original cornerstone article. Such an internal linking structure will help your cornerstone content article to rank in Google.
If you sell ballet shoes and your cornerstone content article is about the importance of well-fitted ballet shoes, you could write blogposts about ballet injuries, different brands of ballet shoes and how to determine the correct size of ballet shoes. Make sure to link from every single one of these blogposts to your original cornerstone article.
Quick wins!
In real life, perhaps you do not have the time to develop such an elaborate structure. Still, writing an article about a specific topic often leads to inspiration to write an article about a similar topic. You should then try to optimize this second post for a slightly different focus keyword and link these posts internally.
Every time you write a post, you should think about similar posts you have written and link to these. Do you already have an important article about this, even though it is not entirely awesome yet? Make sure you set up the right linking structure. This does not take a lot of your time and could really help to rank your most important article. Take a look at all the posts about the topic you have already written and add links to your most important article from all of your (less awesome) posts about that specific topic.
Structure shows importance!
Your cornerstone content pages should be overarching great articles about topics that are really important for your company. Other pages or blogposts should focus on different aspects of the same topic and should all link to the cornerstone content page. This structure will show the search engines which article is the most important on your website. This will eventually lead to the ranking of your cornerstone article in the search engines.
Want to know more?
Would you like to read more about content writing and site structure, you should definitely read our eBook about Content SEO. In this eBook, we explain step by step how to set up a nice site structure and how to write awesome content. If you want more tailor made advice, our review team is more than willing to make an in-depth analysis of your website!
This post first appeared as How to incorporate cornerstone content on Yoast. Whoopity Doo!