4 Methods to Create Website Silos for SEO

si·lo - sīlō/ - verb
Definition: To isolate (one system, process, department, etc.) from others.

Search engines love websites that allow them to easily identify content. Websites with unorganized content make it difficult to understand what the page is about - that means you can’t rank for your target keywords.

By “siloing” your website, aka creating precise content groupings and link signals, you can easily clarify the message you are trying to send to search engines.

Following are some types of silos:

How Should You Sctructure Your Website’s Content?

This is best explained by Bruce Clay (SEO expert) with his jar of marbles example.

By moving your content into jars seperated by classification, you clear up relevancy with search engines.

With organized silos you can have content about numerous topics and still rank for each of them.

How Should You Link Between Your Website’s Content?

Links are what search engine spiders use to crawl from one web page to another. Generating links to your website is a great way to add trust, authority and ranking power with search engines (aka link building, link earning).

Benefits:

Linking content with your website is another powerful ranking tactic that has numerous benefits:

Though much debated, there is no single right way to link your content - here are some of our favorite methods.

Google is getting better at picking up webspam and link schemes. To be safe from Penguin penalties, the majority of inbound links should point at content like blog posts, infographics, etc. (think about it - why the HELL would anyone ever link to your PPC services page unless you paid them to?).

The problem is, these generally aren’t the pages you’re trying to rank. That’s why we use internal links - to distribute the power of your inbound links.

To get started with this method, head to Google Webmaster Tools (GWT) and navigate to Search Traffic > Links to Your Site.

Download the file to Excel and filter the results to find your most linked to content.

Identify the pages on your site with the most inbound links.

When building links to your website, you need to be careful not to over optimize your anchor text and trigger a penatly.

When linking between your pages, you can be aggressive with your anchor text and use exact match keyword phrases.

Internal links pass link juice. Therefore we can use pages with high inbound links to distribute that ranking power to other pages.

This is a method requires a blog with taxonomies (aka categories in WordPress) and works great for ranking local pages.

Target Keyword: “Miami PPC Company”

1. Create categories on your blog based on the terms you’d like to rank for (PPC, Miami)
2. Create great content for each category - make content hyper specific to that category.
3. Link category posts together using anchor texts related to your keywords.
4. Link category posts to target page with exact match anchor texts (don’t overuse them).

Bonus Tip: If you’re trying to rank for local terms, build links from local websites. For example, create web 2.0 blogs (miamibusinessreviews.wordpress.com), Pinterest links (use Geo located feature) and YouTube videos (use Geo located feature) and link them to your category posts.

This method creates a circular silo of blog posts around a silo page. This silo of blogs posts links directly to your silo page, creating massive relevancy signals to search engines.

1. Create at least 4 blog posts about a singular topic related to your target silo page.
2. Every blog post must link to another blog post within the content silo.
3. Every blog post must link back to the silo page.
4. Blog posts should only link to one silo page. Linking to additional silo pages breaks the circle of relevancy.
5. Duplicate this for every silo page you would like to rank.