Simply put, Siloing is architectually structuring your website to get the Search Engines to recognize your site is about your targeted keywords. You want the Search Engines to consider you as the subject matter expert.
What exactly is a Silo?
“A silo is a vertical page linking design. You have your landing page, or your main page, at the top of the silo and underneath this page you have pages which support your main landing page theme.”
Siloing is a very powerful method to get ranked on Google. There are a lot of things to do that by themselves have little weighting, and all those little things add up for a powerful punch. But, siloing is a power punch all by itself. It’s an advanced SEO technique that is a heavyweight amongst SEO techniques.
What’s the problem?:
For example, lets say you have an ecommerce site selling widgets. And, you want to optimize for “red widgets”. But, you also sell white, black, green, purple, and 200 other types of widgets. So, the multitude of all those other 199 types of colored widgets are diluting the “red widgets” on your website. By selling 199 other types of widgets, your site might not be recognized as a subject matter expert on “red widgets”.
The answer is, you want to create themes (silos of content) within your website. The question is, how do you delineate themes, instead of bleeding them all together?
Whether you use Directory or Virtual Silos, keep in mind that cross-linking between subjects dilutes your theme.
There are several ways to create silos:
1) Tagging
2) Categories
3) Directories
4) Related pages plugin
5) ONLY link to landing pages using your Target keyword.
6) Create a mini-sitemap on each page within your silo.
Note: Many websites will find the need to increase the amount of their content by creating additional webpages.
Expected Outcomes:
1) Higher rankings
2) Increase in overall traffic
3) More unique visitors
4) More traffic from long tail keywords.
An added benefit is that Siloing will appeal to both your users and bots.
Additional Resources:
PageRank sculpting
Siloing WordPress: video presentations
Siloing Revisited
Building a Web Site Theme with Silos
Theming Through Siloing
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{ 9 comments… read them below or add one }
Hello
Interesting article, we are thinking of updating our epos website to be more search engine friendly, but wanted to know if using the mod-rewrite with a full cms system would allow the search engines to index more pages providing we use kw phrases in our url for each dynaic page.
Very great article — more times than not people optimize for one item as opposed to keeping in mind the others. Thanks for posting!
How do you feel about using subdomains for the silos? I have an .edu that I am working with and my suggestion has been going this route for their different departments or schools if you wish.
By the way, this is a great article.
@The Dismal Marketer:
Subdomains can be treated as a separate domain. So, I wouldn’t use that as a first tactic. You could use subdomains as an additional method to throw a link at your Target URL. But, stay focused on building a strong theme within your TLD.
Hi Shimon,
Thanks for writing for us
I have one ecommerce site on Magento..can u pls suggest me some tips on how we can implement Content soiling there? We are redesigning & developing the site.
The site is mentioned on my signature link. Hope to hear from u soon!
web
Hi,
I’m using Wordpress for my site but with static pages so it looks less like a blog. How would I best apply the silo method by using pages, posts or could I combine both?
thanks for a great site btw
Steve
I like your post! I hope that I can begin to utilize some of the methods you discussed!
Hi,
first time i heard about siloing… got to learn more.. Thanks for the inputs.. really help me a lot to understand about siloing
Thanks for the interesting article, the idea was great. Siloing , surely this will help to have a much better page rank. This is really one of the advance SEO techniques in optimizing pages.
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