Here are some simple tips that you need to focus on creating a cornerstone article that leaves a lasting impression on your readers.
Anyone who drives WordPress blog/ site almost came across the WordPress SEO by Yoast plugin. Why not? It gives ultimate features for anything a professional SEO Specialist could wish for. Recently, on Tuesday, Yoast SEO releases one more update. They have released a great new free tool, i.e., the cornerstone content analysis feature, to help you analyze your site’s cornerstone article.
What is Cornerstone Article?
Cornerstone articles are the content that is most important for your website. These are those articles that you would love to rank high on search engines to show your business and conveys your mission.
Generally, cornerstone articles are quality content, relatively long articles that combine insights from different blog posts.
Such type of article plays an important role in SEO strategy. It helps you tackle some competitive search terms.
Well, few bloggers don’t know how to write a cornerstone article. No problem, Here I will guide you to do so.
Generally, a cornerstone article leaves a lasting impression on your readers that will make them want to come back for more and remember your site. It empowers readers without necessarily forcing them to share and recommend the website to other people.
Here are few simple steps for writing such type of articles in less than an hour.
1. Analyze your target audience:
Analyze what your audience is searching for and know their preferences. Your article must give information about the type of people you are aiming to get noticed.
When people found such informative and expert articles on your site, they are more likely to treat your information as fit for their needs and interests.
2. Keyword Research:
It involves identifying popular words and phrases people enter into search engines to figure out the information they are searching for. Keyword research gives a blogger a better understanding of trending keywords and their competition in organic search results.
All keyword research starts with a topic, idea, etc., that may come from any field. Now, find the popular keyword for your topic. Also, check about its competition and SERPs as well through a keyword research tool.
I would also like to suggest that you do not use meta keywords because search engines have stopped using meta keywords tags in web ranking. Instead of focusing on them, focus on your research with the main keyword, i.e., focus keyword.
3. Write Clickable and Eye-catching Title:
Without a clickable and eye-catching title, your cornerstone article is incomplete because it affects your overall traffic and their reach.
While creating, consider these following things:
Make sure, your content:
- Draws people in
- Is sharable
- Isn’t manipulative
Now, You have to write it by following these tips:
- Insert some psychology.
- Focus on benefits.
- List out multiple headlines and test them according to their % of clicks.
- Use the main keyword by using psychology.
4. Create Good Quality Post:
Writing a good quality post with good planning works well. It is simple as you are merging some key points that you want to cover in your article. The only condition is, the words should be yours only.
Here is how you can do it. It just involves asking yourself some basic and easy questions. They are as follows:
- What do you want to say in your post?
- What questions are you trying to answer?
- What are your perspectives towards it?
- Does it relate to any external post? (outbound link)
- Had you before got an idea about it? (internal link)
Answering these simple questions can help write a post in a much quicker and easier way.
Creating cornerstone content should also be like you are trying to establish communication with your customers.
Now, you came to know about creating cornerstone article.
Although the term was introduced a few years ago, many bloggers like you never thought about it before. There are a few articles on your site that do well in the search engines.
Now, you might have a question, ‘if this is the thing, then how could I determine it?’ So here in this guide, I will help you to determine which articles are your cornerstones. I will also provide some tips to optimize them to increase their chance of ranking.
Let’s start.
1. Choose any of the best posts:
Choose the best post that you think ranking batter on the search engine. Make sure you have used the most important and most competitive keywords.
2. Recreate it:
After finding your best content, recreate it, and make it more awesome and SEO friendly. Enlarge it as long as you can. Cornerstone articles tend to be longer than regular articles. But no garbage!! You have to write all the information that is relevant to your topic. Also, focus on readability and writing structure.
3. Optimize other blog posts:
Once you have done with rewriting your regular article into cornerstone one, the next thing you have to do is paying attention to the blog posts that interlink similar topics as your cornerstone article. Make sure these other topics are well optimized for long-tail keywords relevant to the main keyword.
This is how you could determine which of your articles are the cornerstone—it all about raising your common standards and creating an extraordinary one.
If you still can’t analyze your cornerstone contents, here one more good news for you. This Tuesday, Yoast SEO announced, they have developed a special cornerstone analysis. WOW!! THAT’S REALLY GREAT.
According to Yoast, Cornerstone content should be better than your other articles, and the demands of your writing should be higher.
What is Cornerstone analysis?
The cornerstone analysis is an adaptation of the default SEO analysis with higher standard sets.
How does it work?
If you are focusing on the cornerstone, you need to check the box cornerstone. The default analysis will automatically change the cornerstone analysis.
Checks adapted:
- The article must contain at least 900 words.
- Keyword in subheading
- Meta description length
- Title width
- Images
- Links
- URL keyword
- URL links.
Common, get up, and start optimizing your cornerstone content. Also, use the analysis as a guide to finding out which aspects of the article you could improve.
