What Type of Content Should a Cornerstone Article Be?

People often ask us how to improve their rankings on specific keywords. In our site reviews, we can really analyze a site and come up with a tailor-made answer to that question.

But in most cases, the information about cornerstone content written by Joost de Valk almost an era ago would still be sufficient. In Joost’s awesome post, you can read you have to create a few really awesome pages and optimize these pages for your most important keyword. Subsequently, you should link to these very awesome pages with your other pages and blogs (focusing more on long tail keywords).

In this blog post, I would like to tell you a little bit more about cornerstone content. What type of content should these pages have? What should you be writing on these pages? And why?

What Exactly are Cornerstone Articles?

Cornerstone articles are the most important articles on your website. This is the content that exactly reflects your business. These articles should be relatively high in your site structure. In most cases, the homepage directly links to these articles. That doesn’t always have to be the case, though.

One of our most prominent cornerstone articles is our WordPress SEO article, which is actually two clicks away from our homepage. Confronting my dear husband with this fact, he immediately admitted that this was wrong and that it’ll be corrected our redesign. Practice what you preach!

If you could think of four pages you would like someone to read in order to tell them about your site or company, these would need to be the cornerstone articles. Thus, these articles should really focus on the mission or the most important products of your website or company.

Type of Content for a Cornerstone Article

Cornerstone content should always be content pages. Not a blog post, an actual page containing important content. This page should be timeless and updated very regularly. You must make sure these pages stay up to date. Cornerstone articles should be explainers, it should definitely be informative articles. In an earlier blog post about text objectives, I differentiated between three types of texts, one of which is  the informative text is the first.

In an informative text, you explain something to your audience. You want them to understand more about a topic or you want them to use your information (put theory to practice). A good informative text will usually need quite some investigating in order to decide on the exact content of a piece. Your cornerstone article, being one of the most important of your site, definitely deserves some investigation!

Example

If you own a webshop selling ballet shoes, you should definitely write a cornerstone content article about the different types of ballet shoes you are selling. But you could also create a page about the importance of good and well-fitted ballet shoes. Perhaps you could even write an article about the prevention of ballet injuries. Starting to rank on those pages will help you to sell your shoes as well.

For a webshop, the cornerstone content should be in informative articles. I imagine this is hard. But your cornerstone content should not be focused on convincing people to buy your products.

It should be nice articles, that show your customers the uniqueness of your product. Perhaps you can write about the use of the products you sell, or about something closely related to the products you sell. Cornerstone articles shouldn’t be to ‘salesy’.

Cornerstone content should reflect exactly your business or the mission of your business. Focusing on the field around your business could be a fine strategy to increase your audience and potential buyers.

In our case, our cornerstone article is an informative article about one of our free products. It was read by lots of people and made our brand successful. Make sure your cornerstone article is informative, fun to read, and extremely well-written.

Source:http://www.searchenginejournal.com/type-content-cornerstone-article/135475/