Cornerstone Content As Part Of Your SEO Strategy

The term “cornerstone content” has been popping up in SEO discussions. WordPress users have likely seen this as they fill in their Yoast fields. Cornerstone content is the best articles on your site, the pages or posts you want to rank highest in search engines. Cornerstone content is part of your SEO strategy. These articles should:

• Be fairly long and informative.
• Provide insights from different blog posts covering everything that’s important about a certain topic. 
• Inform—not necessarily sell products. 
• Communicate your mission and describe your business.
• Be well written, updated often and rank for your most competitive keywords.

Cornerstone articles help target key search terms

A cornerstone approach can help you tackle your key search terms. If you write a lot of articles on similar subjects, you need to tell Google which of them is the most important. Otherwise, you’ll be eating into your own market share insearch. Providing an internal linking structure among your posts tells Google which article is the most important.

Cornerstone articles should be easily accessible on your website

Users should be able to click straight from your homepage to your cornerstone articles. All your other posts about similar topics should link back to their corresponding cornerstone article. This internal linking structure will increase the chance of your cornerstone content articles ranking in Google searches.

An example of how to implement a cornerstone strategy

I’m in the process of updating my own website to implement a cornerstone content strategy. I write a lot of posts about content marketing that touch on a range of topics, including SEO, branding, social media, industry information and content delivery. I’m a fairly disciplined writer, and I have more than 300 blogs on my website. 

I’m writing one cornerstone article with an overarching title: SEO and Your Website: Writing Content that Search Engines Love. Whenever I write a new post on SEO and content, I will link this to the cornerstone article. I’m putting this article on my homepage to tell Google that this is the most important article about SEO copywriting on my site. This will increase its chances to rank.

Choosing articles to become part of your cornerstone strategy

If you’ve got a bunch of articles from which to choose for your cornerstone article, look for those that are the most current and informative. Do these target the keywords you most want to rank for? Check for readability—something on which Yoast scores us. Think short sentences and short words. Creating internal links is important, and Yoast also scores us on these. Make your copy easy to read and understand. Break it up with plenty of subheads to make it visually appealing. When you look back at what you’ve written, those subheads should tell your story. 

WordPress’ Yoast is a plugin

For full use of Yoast’s cornerstone functionality, WordPress wants you to upgrade to premium level. If, however, you’re tired of getting nickel and dimed for apps, just follow the guidelines I’ve outlined here. 

Find this confusing? 

Give me a call and let’s create an overarching SEO strategy for your content. Contact Top of Mind Marketing. Writers and content marketers. 

Increasing SEO Value with Image Alt Tags

Today’s impatient audiences demand pictures—we want high-quality, high-resolution photos, infographics, charts and screenshots–to help tell a story. It shouldn’t come as a surprise then, that Google’s search engine results pages (SERPs) deliver as many results from images as from text. If you’re upgrading your website’s SEO value but ignoring the images on your site, you could be missing out on an important source of organic traffic.

It’s time to start adding alt tags to your images

Also called “alt text” and “alt descriptions,” alt tags are the written copy that appear in place of an image on a webpage if the image fails to load. This text helps screen-reading tools describe images to visually impaired readers and allows search engines to better crawl and rank your website. Optimizing image alt tags creates a better user experience for your visitors.

Be accurate, be descriptive

A good rule of thumb: Think about what someone would see if he/she pulled up a page and couldn’t see the actual image for whatever reason—just the alt tag descriptor. Let’s say we’re looking at a photo of Steph Curry shooting a 3-pointer in an overtime win against the Boston Celtics. A good alt tag: Oakland Warriors’ Steph Curry scores a 3-pointer in overtime to beat the Celtics. Think of this as a little formula.

Here are some best practices for writing effective alt tags

• Be specific. Use both the image subject and the article context as guides.
• Keep alt tags within 125 characters. We’re all used to character limits these days, so keep it brief and relevant. Screen-reading tools stop reading alt tags at 125 characters, cutting off long-winded alt descriptions.
• Forget about starting alt tags with “Picture of” or “Image of “.Don’t use up your character limit on these unnecessary descriptors. Screen-reading tools will already have identified the object as an image from the source code.
• Use your keywords sparingly.Include your article’s target keyword or keyword phrase if it’s easily included in your alt tags. Consider semantic keywords, or just the most important terms. Google is smart and understands semantics. If we go back to our Steph Curry model, we would likely use “curry 3-pointer” in our alt tag because the article is going to be about how this shot was critical to the Warriors’ win.
• Don’t cram your keyword into every single image’s alt tag.If your blog contains a series of images within the blog, include your keyword in at least one of those images.

How to add alt tags to your images

It varies by platform, but in WordPress, open Media, click on an imageand it will bring up a window where you can create/edit each alt tag. I find it handy to open two screens—one for the Media file and one for the article associated with each image because it provides the context that will influence the alt tag.

Could you use some help identifying alt tags for your website? Give me a call!

Keywords: It’s Where the Online Journey Begins

Our economy has moved online and those businesses that can’t be found online will be challenged to succeed. Keywords are the building blocks that are fundamental to every journey that results in our landing on a website.

Here are some ways that keywords are deployed.

1. For Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

This is the most obvious–we need keyword research to optimize for organic search. Organic search is what we do a gazillion times/day; we key a word or phrase into a search engine such as Google, hoping to get an answer to our question. SEO helps Google bots crawl and index our websites to rank on search engine results pages (SERPs). One of the ways that search engines decide what to rank is by crawling for keywords that show the relationship between the user’s search query and the content on a corresponding website.

2. For maximizing content strategy

We’ve all been told about the relationship between SEO and content. Without content on your website, strong SEO will not follow. Building a comprehensive presence in the online space means updating your website and social media sites with fresh content.

“Effective content strategies start with keyword research,” says Search Engine Land columnist Nate Dame. “Modern keyword research provides significant insight into what audiences want and need.”

Content should have a relationship to keywords

Every single piece of content on your site—a 300-word blog post or 5,000-word white paper, should be related to keywords that strike the right balance between high search volume and competition. To keep in mind: Maybe you did keyword research four or five years ago when you created your website. It might be time to redo this. Google changes its algorithms some 500 times/year and this affects search terms and competition.

3: For Paid Campaigns/Pay-per-Click (PPC)

Paid campaigns–PPC ads, display ads, remarketing or social media campaigns–are also keyword focused. Paid search is an auction where you bid on individual keywords

Keywords once again are the building blocks that make up ad groups, and these ad groups are the basis of campaigns. If your keywords have low search volume, then your ads are going to get little or no traction. If your keywords aren’t relevant to your target audience, you won’t be attracting the audience you’re courting–completely wasting your marketing dollars.

The bottom line: Keyword research is ground zero for all search marketing campaigns

But more than that, identifying your keywords and using them throughout all of your online communications is critical to their success.

Do you need help with your PPC or other online marketing program? Talk to us at Top of Mind Marketing. We’re internet marketing specialists.

Landing pages help promote your company’s products and services and encourage conversions from your web traffic. A landing page, officially any page on which you land, always has its own unique url. Landing pages can be temporary—thrown up as part of a campaign to promote a product or service. People will click on a call to action and land on this page; it’s generally taken down once the campaign is over. The messaging on these pages should be crisp, focused and direct. These landing pages are necessarily shorter.

Longer landing pages promote trust and credibility

The landing pages that promote your products and services need to have more substance—that means 300+ words. Longer landing pages generate trust and credibility, motivating web visitors to convert once they’ve learned more about you and your company. The user who scrolls to the bottom where the call to action is located and views all aspects of the page is typically a higher-quality lead—that’s the potential client who wants information about what you do. Don’t disappointment them by not answering their questions about what you do and how you work with your clients.

Short landing pages translate to missed opportunities

Longer landing pages: increased SEO value

As you increase the likelihood of conversion with longer landing pages, you also increase the SEO value of your website. Longer pages rank better in search engines. Use well-written, high-quality content that positions you as an expert.

• Think about using quality video that explains your product. If it’s a service, provide an explanation of how it works. Testimonials are always effective.
• Include images, a bulleted list of a product/service’s benefits and a strong call to action.
• Also think about leveraging internal linking strategies within the pages on your site.

These days, people seem to be text-phobic

I frequently find myself going to websites to get more information—and am rewarded with a few lame sentences that translate to missed opportunities. Whether you’re selling a product or service, why wouldn’t you provide enough information to fully flesh out your business? If you’re selling your products online, longer landing pages with plenty of description is always recommended. If people are spending money, they want detailed information about the product they’re about to purchase.

I became I believer in long landing pages

I finished a project a few months ago that made me a believer in longer landing page content. It was a website for a lighting manufacturers’ rep, and I had to write descriptions of the 90+ manufacturers with which this company worked. Our goal was to provide comprehensive information about each company because we wanted potential clients to come to our site and stay there.

I quickly ramped up to the fascinating and complex lighting industry. I wanted to find out a little bit about each of these companies—did they specialize in lighting, controls or daylighting? Were they family-owned, where did they manufacture their products, what was the time to market and what did their customer service ethic look like? The quality of these 90 sites varied dramatically. Some were beautiful, with comprehensive portfolios of their national and international lighting projects. Others were dismal. Some sites didn’t even have an About section—nothing but product info and numbers. Others had badly written information about the company, sometimes talking about the company’s founders some 80 years ago—in which I had no interest. I ultimately had to work with my client SME to get enough information to flesh out some of these profiles.

I learned a big lesson from this project: Provide the information that will answer people’s questions

• As a guide, think about your own questions when you go to a website looking for information.
• Frontload the important stuff so that it’s readily available in the first few paragraphs.
• Try providing a call to action higher in your page rather than burying it at the bottom. Convert people while you still have their attention rather than taking a chance that they’ll scroll to the bottom of the page.

Have questions about landing pages? Talk to us at Top of Mind Marketing. We’re writers and internet marketing experts.