The short answer is yes and the ever useful Yoast for WordPress SEO plugin makes it easy for you.
Let’s look at the basics.
What is Cornerstone Content?
Cornerstone content is the building block of your content, whether that’s posts or pages. For example, if you have clear key services or products, then those pages should be your cornerstone content.
These pages should provide the most complete and clear information on the product or service – making sure your keywords or phrases are included. It’s imporant that these pages are are well written and easily updateable – making them a great sales tool. Turn on the cornerstone button in Yoast and they will have an additional signal to search engines that indicates they are important and should be ranked – even more reason to get your keywords right.
Pages or posts?
Cornerstone content can be either. We’ve talked above about using pages, but posts can be as effective. Let’s look at an example.
If you’ve written a “Definitive Guide to Landscaping your Garden”, but then use that content to write other shorter, spin off blog posts, then your cornerstone content post is the one containing the Definitive Guide.
How to create good site structure
We like to think of it as a hierarchy – with your cornerstone pages or posts at the top and then other pages/posts cascading down from them – site structure and content support for your most important pages/posts.
Linking from supporting posts to your cornerstone pages/posts sets up further signals to search engines. Although not as obviously exciting as other web design aspects, good site structure is vital for user experience and search engines.
Whilst your top level cornerstone page should contain your keyphrases/words for that product or service, your support ones should include long tailed keyphrases. Let’s look at another example.
Your Definitive Guide to Landscaping your Garden concentrates on planting structure and light, your supporting (or lower down pages) could include long tailed keyphrases such as seasonal planting for new gardens, landscaping with evergreen shrubs, how to get the best from a shady garden with a link to the Definitive Guide page.
WordPress and Yoast
Like we mentioned earlier, Yoast is a great plugin for helping WordPress users focus on their SEO and we recommend it for all our websites. There is a free version available or a Premium payable version, along with local SEO Plugins to help focus seach on locations.
You can find the Yoast Cornerstone Content section at the bottom of your post or page.Do you need help with you website, does it have good site structure, page interlinking or perhaps you need a pair of eyes on your SEO?
