Estimated reading time: 4 minutes
What is fundamental content or corner stone?
Fundamental content or corner stone is the main foundation of your website. This page is made up of the best and most important keywords of your website so that it can rank well in Google search results.
This page should only cover a specific topic and is usually the showcase page for product or service introductions, which are prominent examples of corner stones.
Of course, the focus of these pages is to provide the best and most comprehensive information about a specific topic, not to sell a product.
The corner stone page should speak to your business or brand mission.
How to link to a corner stone page?
Corner stone pages have a prominent place on your website. Ideally, users should be able to access the corner stone page directly and with just one click from your home page.
In addition, your other posts and articles on similar topics should transfer their authority, link juice, and traffic to the corner stone page to demonstrate the importance of the corner stone page in your site’s structure to Google.
Therefore, it’s essential to keep the number of corner stone pages limited (4-5 pages at most).
As you move forward, you’ll write a lot of new posts in your blog that are related to the corner stone page from other content perspectives, and each of these articles naturally links to the relevant fundamental content or corner stone page.
This powerful internal linking structure increases the chance of ranking your corner stone page higher in Google searches.
Consider this example: Imagine looking at a map of a country. Small towns and big cities are somehow connected to each other. However, more roads end up in the big cities compared to the small towns.
These big cities are actually your cornerstones and receive the most links. Small towns are actually your posts and articles about more specific topics, which some roads (links) lead to, but not to the extent of the big cities.
The fundamental content that Google loves
The process of creating cornerstone content is as follows:
- Start with proper keyword research and select relevant keywords or key phrases for your content.
- Use appropriate titles and Title tags.
- Use comprehensive and engaging content for your cornerstone page.
- The cornerstone page is actually an SEO landing page.
- The cornerstone content page should be long and ideally include infographics, motion graphics, and videos.
Cornerstone content and Yoast plugin
If you are using WordPress, note that the cornerstone content is so important that the popular Yoast plugin has added the ability to identify your own cornerstone page with a simple checkmark in its latest update.
Get Help from Pillar Pages
If your website structure is properly organized, Pillar Pages can be the strongest pages that can transfer their power to their related cornerstone pages.
If you’re not sure what a Pillar Page is, read the Pillar Page article. Let me clarify the topic with a clear example.
Suppose you have a Pillar Page titled “Travel to Turkey,” which provides a lot of information about hotels, foods, and tourist attractions in Turkey and also links to a large number of related articles.
On the other hand, you have a cornerstone or foundational page called “Turkey Tours,” in which you describe your travel agency services, such as sending travelers to Turkey, and update Turkey tours on an hourly basis within this page.
Now the question is, if someone searches for the term “Turkey tours” on Google, which page of your website as a travel agency do you want Google to display?
You probably say the page for Turkey tours. It’s natural because ultimately you want to sell your tours, not just introduce the audience to hotels in Turkey!
So you need to be able to convince Google that the Turkey tours page is the main page of our agency for searches related to Turkey tours, i.e., the cornerstone of the site.
To do this, you need to take many actions, one of which is to give a link from the pillar page to the cornerstone.
On the other hand, be careful about the links you give from the cornerstone page to other pages, and try not to get any worthless links from the cornerstone other than CTA links.
