Search engines award top keyword rankings to the site that proves that it the best fit for the relevancy of a subject or theme that matches the user query. As a result the primary goal of SEO is to improve the website so that the site is about more than targeted keyword phrases – it is about the themes matching those keywords.
More often than not, a website is a disjointed array of unrelated information with no clear central theme. Such a site suffers in search engine rankings for sought after keywords. Siloing a website will serve to clarify your website's subject relevance and will lay the groundwork for high keyword rankings. It is a core building block for search engine optimization and is normally an advanced topic.
The term siloing originated as a way to identify the concept of grouping related information into distinct sections within a website. Much like the chapters in a book, a silo represents a group of themed or subject-specific content on your site. The reason this grouping is such a high SEO priority is that search engines award "keyword" relevancy within their index based on the page and then the rest of the site with the most supporting relevant content. Well ranked websites are founded upon the concept that a website should physically be organized like a doctoral dissertation. A dissertation has a clearly identified title, abstract, table of contents, then content laid out to reinforce the overall theme of the dissertation as a whole, all with references and footnotes supporting the subject.
While doing SEO of any website we talk and do a lot on on-page and off-page optimization. We optimize website’s title and Meta tags, its content; we use H1 and H2 heading tags. We focus a lot on link building and try to get relevant and quality back-links. But what is it that we still done rank on the chosen keywords. There’s one thing that we often ignore or just forget to include in our SEO strategy which is website SILO.
Website silo architecture is the process of implementing a structure whereby each topic is housed in it’s own mini-site within the site and the internal linking pushes ranking factor back up to the primary / topic page otherwise dubbed the “silo landing page”.
While SEO is simpler than most so called “experts” imply, it’s like the difference between a short order cook and a chef, they both cook food and often use the same ingredients, but it’s how they use them that matters.
Similarly, when you dial in the appropriate on page and off page SEO using website silo architecture, then regardless of whether your website is aged or new, a website which previously had zero presence can instantly sprout wings and start ascending the SERPs (search engine result pages) to the top 5 results.
On the contrary, if your execution lacks the proper structure for the granular ingredients, then lackluster results are sure to follow. You have to (a) understand your topic (b) create a top down model (starting from broad phrases to specific categories and supporting content) and (c) put each thing in its proper place.
So, what is the proper way to structure a result-driven SEO campaign? Here’s our take on five fundamental methods which we have deemed evergreen SEO principles we’ve used for years to create proven results.
seo-silo-structure.
Some Simple Rules For Silo Websites:
1. Keep your categories separate. Use nofollow attributes when linking between categories.
2. Link to posts, not categories or tags.
3. Link often between posts. Most people only link from new posts to older posts, but I suggest you go back to older posts and add updated links to your newer posts. Older posts will have more pagerank too.
4. Try to keep the categories on the same topic. Remember, every page in your website should have a different title, meta tags, headers, etc… When organizing your silos, make sure you have distinct keywords that follow everything in that category.
For example, let’s say you are blogging about cars. You will set up a silo for trucks, cars, and motorcycles. This is very high level, in reality you will want to get much more “niche”.
Take the truck silo. Your title should “All about trucks”, your category slugs should be “trucks”, your meta keywords should have “trucks”, and most importantly, all the posts in this silo should have “trucks” in the title and permalink.
Again, this is very high level, but hopefully you can understand the strategy.
5. Learn to use tools to analyze your website content. Google webmaster tools will show you everything you need to understand how Googlebot spiders your website.
I can fully understand that maintaining a silo structure for your personal blog might be tough, since you probably blog about a wide range of topics, but it can be done.
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