De-mystifying Website Structure and Siloed Content.

Ever notice how any websites try to link all of their pages haphazardly to each other? This spray gun approach to website structure (aka: a website’s information architecture) makes it extremely difficult for the search engines to tell what a website is about. Of course, this typically results in lower search engine rankings… and lower search rankings mean the site won’t be found by potential customers. Game over!

Help Search Engines Identify Your Website’s Area of Expertise

When trying to understand content siloing, think of each silo as a separate website with unique content and themes.
Let’s say you have an insurance site. This website currently links all content (that includes car insurance, health insurance and travel insurance pages) willy nilly. You find that it is difficult to achieve success on search engines for any major keywords because you have many content themes that interlink.

Good SEO via Two Types of Silos

To theme content in line with SEO best practice, there are two types of silos:

Directory Silos – reinforce themes by grouping similar content pages under one, highly organised directory. A minimum of five content pages are needed to establish a theme and each must be named appropriately to reinforce the subject matter. The tighter the silo, the better your chance of ranking for both general and specific long tail keywords within the theme.

Virtual Silos – cross-link to pages with like-minded content (thereby creating subject themes). The easiest way to create a virtual silo is to include navigation on the page to interlink pages and create a mini-sitemap on each page within the subject theme.
With virtual silos, the theme of the top landing page is created by supporting pages linking to it. A virtual silo is used primarily with established websites that may not already have an effective directory file system in place.

Silo Solutions for SEO Success

Let’s return to our insurance site. One way to create strong silos along keyword themes would be to only link car insurance pages to each other (and back to the car insurance navigation page) and link travel insurance pages to each other (and back to the travel insurance navigation page).
Our insurance site would stand a better chance of developing specific themes around each main content area and greatly improve its chance of ranking well for both generic and specific keywords.

Directory Silos for a New Website

If you’re designing a website from scratch, directory silos are the way to go. You can design your site’s information architecture in line with the way your customers search – and get the rewards of good search rankings for the keywords that really matter to your business (that’s the goal anyway…)

Virtual Silos – for an Existing Website

The reality is that most of the time you already have a website (with all the baggage that comes with it). It isn’t optimised and quite often not siloed at all. So what do you do? That’s where virtual silos come in. Virtual Silos are usually not as easy to implement in websites with an existing architecture, but they will most definitely contribute in a big way (if done right) to your overall SEO success.
If your website is due for a face lift, consider directory silos. The long term benefit of siloing content under specific directories is one of the best ways to achieve success in SEO and get found online.