Cornerstone Content Begins

Cornerstone ContentI finally started my first project to create cornerstone content. This is a fascinating thing about the internet and search engines. Having a hundred small pages on a subject does not get you to rank nearly as high as having a single substantial page. So given that I have at least a couple dozen pages on various aspects of Don Quixote, I’m in the process of creating just such a page. But it will be months in the making. I just wrote the beginning of it. The article is called, Don Quixote in English Language Translation.

Thus far, it is all original content. In fact, the article is worth checking out. I talk about what Don Quixote is. People think of it as a novel, but it’s actually two novels. And they are rather different. It’s too bad that the first novel isn’t published alone any more. As it is, I think the thickness of the book puts people off. And the first novel stands all by itself. In fact, there really is nothing in the second book that is part of our cultural identity. And I say that as one who thinks that second novel is superior. Anyway, check it out. Even though it is a page (as opposed to a post, which is what this article is), you can still leave comments.

Eventually, I will get to the point of doing a summary of the stuff I’ve written about on the blog. This is actually kind of backwards. The idea of cornerstone content is that you are supposed to start with that. But who thinks about such things when you start a blog? In fact, even after all my work with Quality Nonsense (where I always have to think about SEO), I didn’t think about this kind of stuff on Frankly Curious. My thinking started to change when I installed the Yoast plugin for WordPress.

Yoast is a bit of nag software that reminds you of things and alerts you to things that you do wrong. For example, it has you assign a “focus keyword” for each post. For this article, it is “cornerstone content.” And then it is very unhappy if it constitutes less than 0.5% of the words you’ve written. At the same time, it doesn’t like it if it represents more than 2.5%, because apparently Google will think that you are “keyword stuffing” and would potentially see the page as spam.

How Cornerstone Content Will Make Us Famous!

Another big thing that Yoast does is keep track of the focus keywords that you’ve used in the past. If you’ve used the focus keyword once before, it warns you and mentions that you might check out it’s page, Using Cornerstone Content to Make Your Site Rank. But if you’ve used the focus keyword more than once before, it complains. It’s complained a lot about “Donald Trump” and “Bernie Sanders” and “Hillary Clinton.” Which, makes me think that the next election cycle I might start a page for the election itself. That’s undoubtedly what smart and experienced bloggers do.

In addition to this, my “boss” Toni thinks that Frankly Curious gets half the traffic that it ought to considering the quantity and quality of the content. And I would definitely like to get more traffic. And that’s especially true when it comes to something like Don Quixote. the truth is that there aren’t really any sites that answer the common question, “Which Don Quixote should I read?” And given the fact that I’m also a big advocate for the book, I’d like to have more people ending up here.

But using cornerstone content has a good aspect to it that has nothing to do with making the site more popular. I do want to put together all my thoughts on Don Quixote and other subjects. Just the same, most people are not interested in reading 20,000 word articles. So this is perfect. People can get here because Google likes these long articles, but then they can quickly find links to specific information that they are looking for.

Of course, I don’t know how well this is all going to work. The experts claim this is the way you are supposed to do things. Right now, a search of “don quixote translations” brings up my very old article, About to Read Don Quixote in the top ten. It’s a clever idea for an article but I know infinitely more now. And I’m keen to share that knowledge.

2 thoughts on “Cornerstone Content Begins

    • Yeah, but it really isn’t so bad. There are always constraints on your work. And I’m actually pretty excited about this project. The only thing I do mind that there are some details that have to be done for computers because they are stupid. But it could be worse. And it used to be! At least now we have a better idea of what we need to do. And Google is using more human analysis to determine if pages are good and useful. It’s funny that we are moving in that direction. But there does seem to be the need because as good as computers get at talking and seeming human, they still don’t understand things in the way that humans do. Watson might be able to answer Jeopardy! questions; but it would also be able to answer those same questions if they were posed in a human un-readable format. (“I lost war?” The Central Powers of course!) And it would get confused by truly complicated questions. (“That war! The prince one. I don’t even know who the groups were. But the one that didn’t win. What was that?”) More and more, I think it is wrong to ask if computers will ever think. They already think. They will never think in the way that we do. And that makes them limited. In an article I wrote for another website, I noted that even the most advanced computer is infinitely more dependent upon humans than any puppy.

      But the good side is that Google really has made internet content a lot better because content creators can’t get away with the garbage they could a couple of decades ago.

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