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How our cornerstone analysis helps you create your best articles

Cornerstone articles should be the best and most complete articles on your website. That means that you should make an effort to make this article as awesome as possible. Raise your normal standards and write extraordinary cornerstones. To help you create excellent cornerstone articles, we developed a special cornerstone analysis.

Why do you need a separate analysis?

Of course, our default SEO and readability analysis already helps you to write awesome articles. So, why do you need a separate analysis for cornerstones? The answer to this question is that for cornerstone articles you should raise the bar. Your cornerstones should be the best. They should be better than your other articles, which means a lot is demanded of your writing. Our cornerstone analysis will help you to raise your standards (and stick to them). It will be harder to score that green bullet. You have to do all the important things right!

What does the cornerstone analysis do?

You know our green bullets, right? In our default analysis, we check whether or not your post is readable and SEO-friendly. The cornerstone analysis is an adaptation of the default SEO analysis. In the cornerstone analysis, we’ve set higher standards. A few checks in both the readability analysis, as well as the SEO analysis have been adapted to assess your text more strictly.

How does it work?

When you’re working on a cornerstone, you should indicate so by switching the cornerstone toggle. Once you’ve switched the toggle, the default analysis will automatically change into the cornerstone analysis.

Enabling the cornerstone analysis in Yoast SEO

Which checks are adapted?

To create the cornerstone analysis, we altered 2 readability checks and 6 SEO checks. You’ll need to use enough subheadings, and should make sure to write concise sentences to receive a green bullet in the readability analysis. Cornerstone articles are usually long and therefore a bit harder to read. Subheadings and short sentences will help people to read all the way through the end.

The most important adaptation in the SEO checks is the demand for a lengthy article. Cornerstone articles aim to provide the best and most complete information on a particular topic, which means that they need to be long. In order to score a green bullet on text length, you’ll need to write an article of at least 900 words.

The other checks we adapted for cornerstone articles are:

We’re just a bit stricter concerning these checks. To score a green bullet, you need get all of these right: use keywords in the subheadings, write an awesome meta description, use your keyword in the URL and make sure your images are optimized properly. For cornerstones you just need to go all the way. These are the articles you would like to rank with, so make sure you give them the very best chances.

Strict analysis cornerstone content

Optimize your cornerstones!

So, go ahead and start optimizing your cornerstone articles to make them rank higher. Use the free cornerstone analysis in Yoast SEO as a guide, to find out which aspects of the article you could improve. Keep an eye on the text link counter to see if your cornerstones receive enough internal links. And if you want to take it a step further, get Premium to help you do some sophisticated internal linking. Good luck!

Read more: Site structure: the ultimate guide »

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8 Responses to Cornerstone analysis to help you create your best articles

  1. Omotunde Akintoye
    Omotunde Akintoye  • 5 years ago

    Thanks yaost for the great info. But does readability focus always matter for my ranking?

  2. Shree Shivam
    Shree Shivam  • 5 years ago

    Yoast Plugin is the best way to make you understand whether your SEO needs some improvements or not and if yes then whether you should make changes to make it good ie. Green. If your understanding of Yoast Plugin is good then only you will able to make changes in it and i think cornerstone analysis will be helpful for that things. Must Read!

  3. Nirmal
    Nirmal  • 5 years ago

    Readability is too hard to make green.

    • Willemien Hallebeek
      Willemien Hallebeek  • 5 years ago

      Hi Nirmal,

      It can indeed be difficult to get green bullets for readability, which can be frustrating. Just remember that the checks are there to help write the best text you possibly can :) Perhaps you’ll also find this article helpful: https://yoast.com/yoast-seo-hates-my-writing-style/

  4. Domnick
    Domnick  • 5 years ago

    I’m using yoast seo plugin and planning to switch with premium version but exactly i’m not getting what is difference between this pro and non-pro ver. Can you please tell be some main points whick pro mode can make my site more popular in lesser time.

    Regards,
    Domnick ( India )

    • Willemien Hallebeek
      Willemien Hallebeek  • 5 years ago

      Hi Domnick,

      Good question! Let’s be clear that whether you use the free or the Premium version of Yoast SEO, you always have to invest time and effort into building a good website with quality content, if you want to rank. That being said, Yoast SEO Premium has many features to help you achieve just that:
      – Yoast SEO Premium helps you (in several ways) with your internal linking structure, which is a very important aspect of your SEO strategy
      – It allows you to optimize for synonyms of your keyphrase
      – Premium has a redirect manager, to help you avoid unwanted 404 pages
      – It lets you see and alter what your post/page looks like when it’s shared on social media

      If you want to know more, check out this post: https://yoast.com/yoast-seo-premium-features/

  5. Aliv Dutta
    Aliv Dutta  • 5 years ago

    Hi,
    Thanks for sharing such an incredibly written article. Got to know an insight view of the “cornerstone analysis” that will help me to curate more organized articles in the future. A must-read for all SEO professionals.

    Thanks once again !!!!!!

    • Willemien Hallebeek
      Willemien Hallebeek  • 5 years ago

      Hi Aliv,

      Thanks for the lovely compliment! Great to hear the article was helpful for you :)