Cornerstone content is essential to getting new readers for your blog. What is it? Basically it’s an article that is timeless and packed with good information, exactly what Google wants. This content will often be the first thing a reader sees because of how well it ranks and it should sell that reader on your entire blog. The best way to get this done is a tutorial on something that relates strongly to your blogs theme and promote it as hard as you can.

It is very important that the cornerstone content is optimized for your readers as well as the search engines, it will be your sites flagship. In order to better explain I will take you through the process first-hand and step by step. For this example I will use the subject of “How to SEO optimize your site.”

It’s OK to Steal From Yourself

This article is going to be your masterpiece, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t take the best ideas and content from your previous writing and toss it into this article. That’s not to say you should just patch old content together and leave it but you can certainly draw from the pool of writing you already have. In my blog so far I happen to have a previous article about back-links that would be easy to re-purpose as a resource in my guide. As Mark McGuinness said in an article entitled “The 7 Essential Steps to Creating Your Content Masterpiece”

Make a virtue of the fact that not everyone in your audience has read everything you’ve ever written. After you’ve been blogging for a while, look back at your archives and ask yourself what themes are right for revisiting.

Chances are your thinking will have changed a little since you wrote those early pieces. You won’t be regurgitating, but revising and extending your ideas. You can also link to those posts, which will both boost your traffic and give your new readers a chance to enjoy your previous work.

Essentially you make a win-win situation out of content that was no longer living up to its full potential.

Break it Up

You don’t want the reader to arrive at your site looking for a way to optimize his site and merely be confronted by a wall of text. People want information in smaller chunks and they want to be able to zone in on exactly what they need. To this end I would create a landing page that lays out what exactly I want to achieve with this series of articles and how it will help. For example I might include headings such as “Backlinks“, “Keywords”, ‘”Clean Code”, “MetaData”, “Social Networking” etc. These would all be kept together on your landing or index page so the reader can work through from the beginning without having to scroll forever or they can simply read the article they want.

Another benefit is that a landing page is easy to work with, optimizing your posts can be difficult as you work with keywords and large amounts of text, the landing page is simple and can be tweaked without affecting any of your content.

Don’t Forget the Details

If you ever are going to take SEO seriously then now is the time. You want this content to rank well and get links so you need to help make that as seamless as possible. Use WordPress to publish your content as articles and pages as you will have a much easier time doing behind the scenes optimization. For example on my back-links article I will want to ensure that the page title contains my keyword, the headers are properly placed for the hierarchy of content, my keyword density is good and other search engine optimization techniques.

Figuring this stuff out can be a real pain, especially when it comes to your articles simply because of the sheer amount of code your dealing with. Adding to this is the fact that search engines are constantly “moving the goalposts” on Internet Marketers by simply changing what they look for. The best way to quickly stay on top of these things, at least for me, is outsource it. I use Scribe SEO to take care of article optimization for me. I just have to write my article and submit it securely, it will “read” the article and give me a percentage from 1-100 as well as specific suggestions and information. For example, here is a readout from one of my previous articles (it got 91%)

Additionally it will provide you with a detailed keyword breakdown with suggested keywords and their frequency on search engines, post tag ideas and a preview of how your page will show up in Google results. This whole process literally takes seconds and is kept current despite the constantly changing search engines. Once you start using this it’s seriously hard to imagine how you went without it. One other bonus that is oft-overlooked is the fact that every report you read is like research on SEO, as you try to get a higher percentage you will naturally gain skills in writing optimized content. When I look at my percentages over time there is a slow increase and then a sharp rise that plateaus around 90-95%.

Conclusion

So there you have it, hopefully at this point you have a better idea of how to create some solid cornerstone content that will raise your blogs profile. If you’re interested in checking out the Scribe SEO service I mentioned, which I use and wholly endorse, you can click any of the links I provided or the banner at the bottom of this post.

Thanks for reading!

Alex

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