Using Silo Structure or Maximum On Page SEO Effectiveness
Published June 19, 2010
A common problem for on page optimization is keeping the content within your website organized so that the search engines can make a clear distinction as to the theme or your pages. If you create a website where your content is well structured and if the search engines can make a distinction as to the theme of each page and their relationship to the overarching theme of your site, you’ll have a much better chance of ranking high for the keywords you’re optimizing for.
One of the best ways to accomplish this is to use silo structure to organize the content of your site and make it easy for your users to access your content. This article will give you a simple explanation of silo structure and how you can use it to build a well optimized site.
What is Silo Structure?
The term “silo structure” comes from the concept of silos which are used to sort materials in industrial settings for the sake of keeping the contents of the silos pure. For example, different types of grains are often organized into large columns called silos in order to keep the grains from becoming cross contaminated. On a website, these “silos” are the sections of your website which contain the content that is optimized for your secondary keywords. For example:
Notice that the primary theme of this site is based on the keyword “how to pay the guitar,” and so that’s the keyword you would use in the meta data, page title, headers and in the content of your home page. From there, you would have a navigation bar which contained links to your secondary pages, which would be optimized for your secondary keywords.
For example, your secondary page #1 would contain the keyword “how to play the blues guitar” in the meta data, page title, headers and in the content this page. This page would also include links to the articles which were specific to the topic of “how to play the blues guitar,” which are represented by articles #1 and #2 in the example above. This pattern of content organization would apply for each of your secondary pages and for the articles which were optimized for the same themes as those secondary pages.
Why is Silo Structure Important?
When the search engine spiders crawl your site, they’re looking for how relevant your content is to the terms which you’re optimizing for. If you have the keywords, “how to play the guitar,” “how to play the blues guitar,” “how to play the classical guitar” and “how to play acoustic guitar” all jumbled onto your home page, your secondary pages and your articles, the search engines will have a hard time determining the specific theme of your site.
So if you have competitors who are specifically optimizing for your secondary keywords (and if your niche has any amount of competition you can bet they’ll be out there), their sites will be indexed above yours because they’ve made it crystal clear as to what theme their site is optimized for. However, if you have silos of carefully optimized content for specific keywords related to your main theme, your site will have a much better chance of ranking high for your subthemes and for your primary theme.
Using silo structure will also make it much easier for you to determine an ongoing strategy for adding content to your site and increasing its value with the search engines and your visitors.
Maintaining a Great Silo Structure
Creating fresh content for your site is the key to increasing your value with the search engines and keeping ahead of your competition. If you have a strong silo structure to begin with, it will be easy to determine your ongoing content creation strategy based on that structure. For example, for the site in the example, you have three secondary categories for which you can create articles to add to the content of your site. So an example of your weekly content creation strategy might be:
Monday: Write and post one article on “how to play the blues guitar.”
Tuesday: Write and post one article on “how to play the classical guitar.”
Wednesday: Write and post one article on “how to play the acoustic guitar.”
Thursday: Write and post one article on “how to play the blues guitar.”
Friday: Write and post one article on “how to play the classical guitar.”
Saturday: Write and post one article on “how to play the acoustic guitar.”
After about three months of applying this kind of content creation strategy, you could proceed with a monthly content creation strategy, again based on your overall silo structure. This strategy would be to create one article per week for each of your three categories. By the time six months had passed, you’d have a well structured site with over 100 unique articles, which (provided that you did good keyword research) would be sure to bring you a good ranking in the search results.
Conclusion
The key to success in building a well optimized website is a good foundation of solid keywords and constancy in applying the above strategy for structure and for content creation. Coupled with solid off page SEO, this can make your site stand out and reward you with lots of qualified organic traffic.
To gain access to the most up-to-date SEO strategies, fill out the form below to sign up for our newsletter. This newsletter will help you know what Google's up to as well as how you can get your website ranking higher without raising any red flags.
{"http://www.seositecheckup.com/articles/81":{"data":[]}}
Read Related Articles About On Page SEO
- How to Build Relationships and Your Brand With the New Google Images
It?s virtually impossible to say ?SEO? without thinking ?Google.? Google has always been THE search engine to figure out in the world of internet marketing. If you can utilize the free tools they offer, your SEO campaign will be dramatically better than a campaign which does not. - What We Know: a Guide to "The New SEO"
We can't know everything ? especially after the latest algorithm re-haul. After extensive testing and trial-and-error, though, we've been able to determine a framework for getting real results on the search engine positions. - Taking a "Value First, SEO Second" Approach to Internet Marketing
SEO is, by far, the top strategy used by internet marketers and online business owners. It's easy to see why ? with SEO, you open the floodgates to thousands of unique and "targeted" visitors. These people are searching for a website in your niche, so naturally, once they find it, they?ll be likely to buy your product/service. - Three Examples of a Solid Keyword Strategy
It's not that NONE of the old SEO strategies work ? it's just that SEO is in a near constant state of evolution. The best internet marketers realize this and plan ahead with their SEO strategies. When Google makes a change to their algorithm, savvy internet marketers make changes to their SEO campaigns, ensuring their websites stay on page #1 regardless of what Google's doing. - Five Ways to Make Your SEO Process More Organic to Users and Search Engines
Most marketers know that they need to make their SEO and content creation process more organic. If your link building or your content creation appears unnatural or ?spammy,? you can end up setting yourself back weeks or even months in your endeavor to achieve favorable search engine rankings. - Where the Duplicate Content Rule Came from And How it Really Impacts Your SEO
If you have been spending a lot of money on creating hundreds of unique articles or spinning articles in order to create enough unique content for your article submissions, this might be one of the most important things you?ve read in a long time. Contrary to what many have come to believe, content duplication is something which you can use in your content marketing strategy, and if you do it right, it won?t hurt your SEO. - Five Creative Ways to Add Value and Credibility to Your Website
Value and credibility are the two most important factors when it comes to growing your website. Although they are synergistic (meaning when you focus on one, the other one also improves), you should always be putting yourself in the position of your viewers when building a website. - When Seconds Count: The Importance of Fast Loading Times
Search engines are becoming more conscious of loading times when it comes to determining the rank of your website and also PPC quality scores. However, just how important is page load time the owner of the website? Does it really make that big of a difference when it comes to the bottom line goal for your website to generate qualified traffic and to achieve conversions? In this article, we'll be looking at some spastics which might surprise you about the difference which your page load time makes. - How to Create Well Optimized and Natural Sounding Content
When it comes to creating content for your website or articles for building links back, it can be difficult to create something which is well optimized with your target keywords but which also looks smooth and natural to your human readers. Optimized, keyword rich content often sounds mechanical and even grammatically incorrect, especially when it comes to optimizing for long tail keywords. - SEO Site Structure Principles
Learn the important guidelines for properly structuring your site for search engines. - Speed Up Your Website to Increase Traffic
Learn how speeding up your website can drive traffic and sales. Also learn common methods for decreasing page loading times. - Five Simple Things You Can Do to Increase Conversions On Your Website
The ultimate goal of having a website is to generate more business for your organization. This is true whether your objective is to generate more leads for off-line services, sell shippable products, sell memberships or sell downloadable products. Of course, one way to do this is to achieve a higher ranking with the search engines and to thus attract more traffic to your site. - How to Optimize Your Meta-titles, Descriptions and Keywords
The term "meta data" is used to describe information within the coding of your site that the search engines use to index your site. The search engine companies send programs called "spiders" out to gather information about your site and determine how to display it in the search results page. - How to Use Effective Meta Tags
Learn how to effectively use meta-tags to increase your search engine visibilty and referral traffic. - How Do Outbound Links Affect SEO?
Find out the impact of outbound linking on your site's SEO and the best strategies for building outbound links. - Alt Tags and Other Image Optimization Tools
Having an attractive site is important for making a good first impression on your visitors. This is why it's crucial that you use great looking images to accompany your site copy and to communicate the overall "personality" of your company. - Traffic Conversion Strategies
Learn several great strategies for improving conversions on your website. - How Analytics Tools Can Guide Your SEO Efforts
Learn how and which analytics tools can improve your SEO efforts. - Split Testing to Improve Your Site's Performance
Learn how split testing can greatly improve conversions and user behaviors on your site. - Are Doorway Pages an Effective SEO Technique?
Learn about doorway pages, how they work, and if they are an effective SEO technique. - How to Optimize Your PPC Landing Page for the Google Quality Score
Pay per click (PPC) marketing can prove to be an effective tool for driving traffic to your site and testing variables to optimize your traffic conversion. However, succeeding at PPC marketing takes more than just placing a bid per click that will get you in the top position. It’s also important that your website’s “quality score” is up to par. Without a great quality score,
All Categories:
- Basic SEO (19 articles)
- Online Marketing Tips (18 articles)
- Off Page SEO (13 articles)
- Social Media Marketing (12 articles)
- Seo Product Reviews (4 articles)
- SEO News (6 articles)
- SEO Content Creation (14 articles)
- SEO Programming Topics (14 articles)
- How to Avoid SEO Pitfalls (9 articles)
- SEO Outsourcing (6 articles)
- How to Get More Traffic (10 articles)
- Advanced SEO Strategies (2 articles)
