Silo SEOIt’s just good site architecture.

Let’s kick some ass with silos

Introduction to Silos

• A Silo is not the same as Hallway Pages and Doorway Pages.

• Silos have been around for a long time, but a lot of people still don’t use them.

It’s basically a top-down structure for sculpting link flow more effectively. Google may have disliked the idea of silo architecture in the past, but today it fits with their relevancy based algorithms.

This means it’s a long-term ‘white hat’ strategy.

How it will help:

Rarely do visitors land on the homepage. This means that each page should be treated like a conversion optimized landing page.

The homepage of a website is usually the most powerful piece of real estate you have in terms of SEO power. Most sites are wasting that power by having far too many Internal Links / Outbound Links and not treating the homepage links based on keyword priority. You should go broad > specific because Google’s secondary index of terms and related terms subsume the more specific keywords.

A Silo Architecture’s premise of usage is to solve these issues.

This means pages of importance receive enough link flow to be able to rank while ticking the relevancy factors at the same time.

How It Looks From The Top Level:

The homepage feeds broad, yet specific pages that help sculpt relevancy and pass link flow appropriately.

Location Based Example:

Conveyancing:

- Conveyancing In Sussex

- Conveyancing In Devon- Conveyancing In Exeter

- Conveyancing In Plymouth

- Conveyancing In Hampshire

Silo Architecture Rules:

• Only your silo parent pages go into the top navigation. Your sub navigation is in the sidebar of your parent pages.

• 1. Parents link to the children via a sidebar.

• 2. Children link to each other via the same menu

• 3. Children link to the parent with anchor text in the first paragraph.

• 4. Children pages do not link anywhere else outside of the silo. Period.

• 5. Try to keep to 1 contextual link per 100 words, adjust content length accordingly.

• 6. Keyword density doesn’t have a golden ratio, just don’t over-optimize by going over 8% (Maximum!!!)

• 7. Include keyword stems and long tails on the parent page

• 8. Use images with keywords in the Alt Attributes

• 9. Use your keyword in the first sentence.

• 10. Use your keyword in the last sentence.

• 11. The easiest way to get ranked is to target 1 keyword phrase per page.

• This plugin https://wordpress.org/plugins/widget-logic/ allows you to do the unique page by page sidebars.

Illustrating The Point:

1. On the home page, there are top menu links to the parent pages. That's it.2. On parent pages, you have links to the home page and other parents in the top nav. In the sidebar, you have menu links to the children in the silo.3. On the children pages, there are sidebar menu links to the other children in that silo, as well as the links to the parents in the top nav. VERY IMPORTANT - you need to have a contextual exact match link to the parent in the first paragraph of each child page.

Other Content

Other content within the silo such as posts/articles are allowed however they must be relevant. We use posts within a silo to strengthen and reinforce the silo authority for that particular topic/keyword.

We must not be linking to content within one silo from another silo though as it will break the entire system we have in place for the link flow.

That’s as complicated as it gets!

This is the future of on-page SEO. It means you need far less overall inbound links to the site as we utilize the domains existing power effectively.

By being pragmatic we’re building authority and relevancy to each silo, and ensuring each page receives a good amount of link flow. This improves rankings across the board. Most big sites struggle on this as they grow in size.

Tightly themed silos will invite natural links, especially on location based lead gen sites. This again lowers the need for link building, and all of the relevancy and authority the new naturally acquired links pass are kept within the appropriate silo.

A few more tips:

Your URL Structure or ‘Permalinks’ aren’t as important as the internal linking structure. You don’t need to have /conveyancing/devon/exeter/ although I highly recommend this when working with eCommerce.

In terms of link flow and link weight, the header is given more weight than the footer and the body is given more weight than the header.

The first link in the body is given the most link flow, so again priority is very important here and this is reflected in my silo rules.

In terms of content you can use well spun content, but in these cases always create a unique opening and closing paragraph which contains most of your keywords. As crawlers will skip a lot of the ‘middle’ content. You can observe this by searching queries on Google that match your content. The well spun content always indexes for me, so if you don’t believe it you can just set up some tests and thank me later =]

What About User Experience?

Removing excessive links in Silo-based sites is critical, but with client work and on some of your established sites you will want to make some UX decisions first.

Using Analytics or other trackers, see which links are actually clicked on. If they aren’t it most likely means you can afford to remove these unless they’re there to create a perception of authority, or for link flow reasons.

A silo should improve user metrics like bounce rate, click-through rate etc, because they’ll be landing on your site via a page that is highly tailored to their search intent.

Where can you learn more?

• I have a number of posts on Blackhat.Community in the on-page forum. http://blackhat.community/forums/onpage-trickery.html

• You can add me to Skype via iamdacu (willing to help with questions and also do consulting for $45/hr)

• You can join my mailing list where I give out on-page tips regularly (no auto-responder b.s.) http://eepurl.com/bd-REf

• Ask me for more info on The BHC Free SEO Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1427079050916498/

• See how I set up a modified silo on an Amazon fishing site here; http://video.blackhat.community/