What Is Cornerstone Content?

Date First Published: 5th February 2023

Topic: Web Design & Development

Subtopic: SEO

Article Type: Computer Terms & Definitions

Difficulty Level: 6/10

Learn more about what cornerstone content is in this article.

Cornerstone content is the high-quality and core content of a website whose keywords are intended to rank higher on search engines than the other content and be broad and valuable for users. Examples of cornerstone content are high-value blog posts that offer users a large amount of information and much more than the other blog posts do. Even though cornerstone content is often used to refer to blog posts, cornerstone content can also be in video or audio form. Cornerstone content acts as "pillars" because the content branches out onto multiple posts and related posts are then linked back to the cornerstone piece.

Cornerstone content should be high-quality, easily crawlable and indexable by search engines, provide a good user experience, and be evergreen, meaning that it will always stay relevant and fresh, regardless of the time of year. It should also be open and free and not locked behind a paid subscription or registration form. Also, website owners shouldn't expect everyone who visits the content to buy something or convert. Cornerstone content often aims to create a good first impression so that when users are ready to make a purchase, they are more likely to turn to that website.

Examples Of Cornerstone Content

Cornerstone pages are just what they sound like. They are pages that support other content and are gateways that visitors use to discover a website and explore its pieces. A textual piece of cornerstone content would be a long and in-depth article that completely covers a topic and links to other pages of the website. It can be thought of as a "hub" that leads visitors to deeper pages. For example, an article about how to grow apples would be a cornerstone piece of content that completely covers instructions on how to grow apples and the pages that support it could be articles about the right soil for apple trees and instructions on how to water apple trees.

Another example of a piece of cornerstone content is a guide to cooking with apples. That piece of content would cover the whole topic and the pages that support it could be information about the best cooking apples and instructions on how to peel an apple. This will help to create an effective website structure and make it easier for people to find the information that they're looking for.

Linking Structure

Ideally, someone should be able to click straight from the homepage to cornerstone pieces of content and it should be placed in a noticeable position. In addition, all pages about similar topics should link back to their cornerstone article. This will make its importance clear from the structure of the site. A good internal linking structure will increase the chances of the cornerstone content and the related content being found by search engine bots and it will also prevent orphan pages from being created. This is because creating topic clusters will allow all pages to link to others on the same topic or related topics.

The number of cornerstone pages that a website needs to have will vary, depending on the website and the content strategy. Carrying out keyword research will help website owners get a better understanding of this. A large website will have more cornerstone content than a small website, which will usually have 3-5 cornerstone posts. For a large website, it is likely that more than one topic will be written about in detail, so it is important to choose a cornerstone article for each category.

Some people think of a homepage as a cornerstone article, but it isn't. That is a common misconception. Even though it has a lot of links to it and it is important to optimise it for search engines, in terms of content, it often does not do what a cornerstone article does. A cornerstone article targets a specific topic in detail. The homepage will be much more general than that, have a limited amount of text, and will not give the same opportunity to rank for target keywords.