Have you heard about cornerstone content but not sure what it is? Here’s what SEO experts Yoast have to say:
“Some articles on your site are the most important. They answer people’s questions and solve their problems. So, they deserve to rank! At Yoast, we call these cornerstone articles.”
These articles will typically be the most extensive articles on your site. They can be either a post or page, and should ideally contain at least 900 words.
Selecting the cornerstone content is an essential part of any SEO strategy, as it helps establish the site structure and helps Google to know about your important content.
How to Choose Your Cornerstone Content
The Premium version of Yoast makes this super easy – by offering The Cornerstone Approach: a three-step “workout” that will help rank the important articles that you want to higher.
First, select the articles that meet the criteria for cornerstone content from the dropdown. Next, look at the amount of internal links that are pointing to that content. If a particular cornerstone post or page needs more, simply follow the instructions to Optimize the content.
If you only have the free version of Yoast, then look for the link counter on the full list of blog posts.
The post with the most internal links is a good candidate for becoming cornerstone content.
You can also mark an article as cornerstone from within the post editor itself:
The on/off toggle needs to be switched to On, and your selection will be saved.
Increasing Cornerstone Rankings
One of the key ways to have cornerstone posts rank is to point links to them. More links signal to search engines that those articles are important and valuable.
In the Yoast workout mentioned above, this is very easy to achieve. But it can also be done manually by identifying other pages or posts that are related to the cornerstone, and adding an internal link. It could be as part of the text, or look like this:
The above list can be automatically created by using the Yoast Related Links block: as you can tell we are big fans of Yoast here at AndiSites!
Another way to improve ranking is by following Yoast’s green/orange/red bullet system for both readability and general SEO. If you have marked an article as cornerstone, it may have different criteria from a standard page or post.
Do you have questions about cornerstone or SEO strategies for your site? We’d love to talk with you!
