How Cornerstone Content Pages Work for SEO

One of the most important things to remember here is that when you carry out SEO for your site, whilst you’re trying to rank for given keywords by any means necessary, the majority of the time it’s not really the site as a whole which earns rankings. While the whole site contributes to the ranking, one page from the site in particular will be deemed worthy by the engines as the top ranking page.

When it comes to tough ranking terms, particularly if your business is diverse or has many major categories, it’s unlikely your main domain name or home page is going to be the best landing page for every keyword. If you want to rank for a particular product you sell on a site with many products, it’s not going to be the site overall which ranks but a specific page such as a category or product page which ranks for terms like these.

This is where the cornerstone page treatment comes in. Think of your website as its own entity and for now forget the rest of the Internet. Your website is a collection of pages all joined together by links. Most of those links are generated by your main navigation. But what you also have is internal links. This is when you link from one page to another without using the main navigation. The cornerstone content theory is essentially the following; in order to rank for difficult keywords, nominate a page on your site that you feel is the most appropriate to use as your leading page for that keyword. This page them becomes a cornerstone content page for that particular keyword.

You then need to do two things:

Make sure this page is the most relevant page for the given keyword you want to rank for. This means the page title, the URL and of course the content. This should also be closely centred around the chosen keyword with no room for ambiguity.

You also want to make sure this page is functional. If you do succeed in making this page rank well for a given term you want it to be an ideal landing page for the users too, not just the search engine bots. Make sure you have a call to action or products listed prominently on this page so that it’s useful for the users and your business.

Now it’s time to celebrate this page within your site itself. Ensure it is linked to both from your main site navigation and via an internal link from your home page. The internal linking needs to be broader than this though. Wherever it is appropriate, you should be linking to this page from other pages on your site. Blog pages for example are a great and easy way to do this given their flexibility.

When it comes to external linking you will again want to be linking to this cornerstone page instead of your home page when it comes to generating links with relevancy to the cornerstone keyword.

All in all you’re making it abundantly clear from all angles, that this page is exactly what we’ve been calling it, a cornerstone for the particular subject relating to a keyword. No more generic link building and internal structures. Start boxing clever with your structural SEO.

For more tips and hints on website design, feel free to get in touch with us at Digital Inspired.