Marieke van de Rakt
Marieke van de Rakt is the founder of Yoast Academy and CEO of Yoast. Her favorite SEO subjects are SEO copywriting and website structure.
Foundation material is a vital element of your SEO technique, as it’ll assist you rank for your most competitive keywords. In a nutshell, it means you create a handful of detailed, magnificently written posts and enhance them for your most essential keywords. Then, you link to these awesome articles in other pages and blogs, which concentrate on long tail keywords. Your internal linking structure shows the search engines that your foundations are the most complete, most crucial short articles on your site, which increases their opportunities to rank significantly.
In this article, I’ll tell you a bit more about foundation material. What type of material should these pages have? What should you be writing on these pages? And how do you pick your foundation short articles if your website has been around for a while?
Just what are foundation short articles?
Foundation articles are the most important posts on your website. Their goal is to provide the best and most complete info on a specific topic. They should reflect your business or interact your mission completely. Moreover, cornerstone posts must be timeless, by which we imply they should maintain their importance. It’s likewise important to keep your cornerstone material devoid of errors and up to date.
Above all, you desire your foundation short articles to rank high in the search engines. Composing excellent foundation material and having a good internal connecting method will assist you achieve that.
Check Out more: What is Cornerstone Material? “
Type of content for a foundation article
What kind of text?
As pointed out before, foundation content need to be useful, and in a helpful text you discuss something to your audience. You desire your readers to understand more about a topic or you want them to use your details (put theory to practice). Writing a good helpful text typically requires a little research, to select the precise subject and angle. Your cornerstone short article, being (among) the most important on your website, absolutely should have some digging! Desire to understand more? Read my blog site post about text objectives, in which I differentiate in between three types of texts.
Example
If you own an online shop offering ballet shoes, a great choice is to write a foundation material short article about the various types of ballet shoes you need to offer. However you could also create a page about the importance of good and well-fitted ballet shoes. Maybe you could even write a short article about the avoidance of ballet injuries. Starting to rank on those pages will help you to offer your shoes as well.
It may appear counter-intuitive, however even for an online shop, the foundation material ought to be useful posts. I can picture it isn’t constantly easy to think up such a short article. However your cornerstone content should not be focused on convincing people to purchase your items.
Rather, it ought to reveal your clients the individuality of your product. You could discuss the function of the products you offer, or about something closely associated to the items you offer. Cornerstone articles should not be too ‘salesy’, however utilizing these pages to send individuals to your products pages is fine.
Foundation content should reflect your service or the mission of your business. However taking a somewhat broader technique, concentrating on the field around your business, could also be a fine method to increase your audience and possible purchasers.
Post or page?
It doesn’t matter as much whether you put your cornerstone content in a post or on a page, as long as you ensure that it’s ageless, up to date, easy to find on your website and informative. So, a random blog post, or random page floating around your website somewhere will not do. Give it the attention a page consisting of crucial material is worthy of! And, whichever you select, we advise going for a post or page consisting of a minimum of 900 words for cornerstone material. That’s because long texts rank more quickly than brief text.
Positioning cornerstone content on your site
Your foundation short articles ought to be relatively high in your website structure. In many cases, the homepage needs to connect directly to these short articles. What’s more: you need to make certain that your foundation material short articles get numerous internal links from other related blog posts and pages. Search engines consider posts with lots of internal links to them more vital. Think of it like this: huge cities have significantly more roads leading towards them than towns. Those cities are your foundations. They need to receive most links. The towns are your posts on more specific subjects.
Cornerstone material on an existing website
It’s reasonably easy to stick to the theory when you present your foundation technique from scratch, believing ahead of time about your website’s structure and the keywords you desire your foundations to target. So, if your site has been around for a while, and you’ve never thought of cornerstone content before, how do you choose what your foundation articles are? And, how do you ensure these posts consist of the ideal type of content?
Well, you most likely still have a couple of short articles that do well in search. And you need to have the ability to think about a few articles on your site you ‘d really desire visitors to check out to find out more about your website or company. That’s a great start! Follow these five steps to turn a few of your articles into killer cornerstone material:
Action 1: Consider your keywords
You need to identify the vital keywords you want to rank for. Make sure you utilize the words your audience search for. Trying to rank for words no one utilizes, will not do you any excellent. Your foundation short articles must be enhanced for the most ‘head’ or most competitive keywords you’re going for. However try to remain practical when identifying these head keywords.
Keep reading: Keyword research study for SEO: the supreme guide “
Action 2: Select the very best post
Go through the posts or pages that are enhanced for keywords closest to your most important, many competitive keywords. Which of them do you believe is the very best? That’ll be your foundation post from now on!
Action 3: Rewrite it
Reword your cornerstone article, so it’s incredible and SEO-friendly Broaden it and make certain it’s absolutely up to date. This short article must cover all the info that relates to the subject. Also, make sure the short article is well composed. Checking out from a screen is challenging, and foundation articles tend to be longer than regular posts. So, you need to focus even more on readability. Consider the structure of your text, present subjects in a rational order, compose clear and short paragraphs. The Yoast SEO foundation material analysis will assist you compose exceptional material for your foundation short articles.
Read on: 5 tips for an understandable blog site post “
Action 4: Enhance your other posts on long tail versions
As soon as you have actually selected and improved your cornerstone content posts, it’s time to pay some attention to the blog posts about similar topics as your cornerstone article. These other blog site posts ought to be optimized for long tail variations of the ‘head’ keyword or keyphrase that your cornerstone post focuses on. So, if the keyphrase of your cornerstone article is ‘well-fitted ballet shoes’, the keyphrases of the other article might be: ‘well-fitted ballet shoes for kids’, ‘best fitting low-cost ballet shoes’, ‘fitting classical ballet shoes’ and ‘well-fitted ballet shoes for males’, for instance.
Keep reading: Why you must concentrate on long tail keywords “
Step 5: Linking from those tails to the head
An essential factor to use a foundation content method is to avoid taking on your own content for ranking in Google. That’s why you need to inform Google that your brand-new foundation short article is the most crucial one on your website. You can do that by connecting from all the long tail articles to your cornerstone article!
The link counter in Yoast SEO assists you with this! You can quickly choose your cornerstone short articles in the post overview and see how often they’re linked to internally. If a foundation article gets insufficient links, you ought to connect to it more frequently from related short articles. With Yoast SEO you can see, at a glimpse, which of your cornerstones require a bit more attention!
Conclusion: cornerstone content ought to be the very best content!
There you have it: foundation material ought to be premium helpful material, that shows your business and/or mission perfectly. It can be either a post or a page, as long as it’s easy to find on your site, and it needs to be long enough to be extensive on a particular topic. If you have currently composed lots of short articles for your website, you can follow our actions to a killer foundation method!
Wish to find out more about cornerstone material and carrying out a great foundation method on your site? Go on and take a look at among our SEO courses We have awesome courses on site structure and SEO copywriting that could be simply what you require!
Learn More: Rank with that cornerstone content! “