Internet Marketing

Internet Marketing

Free SEO Book

Setting up your web site properly is very important.  One structure to give some serious thought to is the silo technique.  In the following overview, we'll take a look at what SEO siloing is, and how you can use the silo structure to gain authority and rankings with Google.

The main thought to siloing is that you are creating highly targeted sub-sections of your site.  These sub-sections are going to allow you to create targeted sub pages to target the long tail keywords more effectively.  In addition, using the silo structure is going to allow you to group these sub pages in such a manner that it will increase your authority on your main subject/topic/keyword.

To explain this better, let's take a quick glance at what Google might expect to find on a barbeque site.  To do this, I simply am using Google's keyword tool and typing in "SEO".  It returns me a large list of keywords it would suggest based on that one word.  In a round about way, this tells me what Google might expect on a highly authoritative site about barbeque.

For this example, I am going to look at only the top five results, otherwise we could be here all day.  The top five results returned were:

SEO optimization

SEO keywords

SEO software

SEO services

SEO techniques

So, using the siloing technique, my SEO site is going to be structured using these sub-categories.  I will create these sub categories using folders, naming each folder (in lowercase letters) for the subject phrase.

To illustrate this, let's look at the SEO optimization folder.  If our site is SEO.com, we will create a folder /seo-optimization, and place an index navigation page within that folder, so it will be SEO.com/seo-optimization/index.html.  Another way to name this index page is with the same name as the folder, so barbeque.com/seo-optimization/seo-optimization.html in this example.

This index page should talk about the subject matter, and should target the keyword phrase used to name that folder.  From that index page, you should create at least 3 sub-pages directly related to that folder topic.  For this example, SEO optimization would be my main key phrase, and I would create 3 or more pages in that folder directly related to "SEO optimization". 

For this example, I again used Google's keyword tool and took 3 of the top phrases to round out this silo.  We would then create these pages:

SEO.com/seo-optimization/seo-optimization-companies.html

SEO.com/seo-optimization/seo-optimization-tips.html

SEO.com/seo-optimization/affordable-seo-optimization.html

So now I have a silo for my SEO optimization topic.  You should link to each page within your silo from the index or home page of that silo.  You should also link to the home page of your site.  On each page within the silo, you should link to the other pages within the silo.

You should not cross link between silos, unless the page you are cross linking to is highly relevant.  For example, you may want to link your SEO optimization companies page within the SEO optimization silo to a page or more from your SEO services silo, but you would not want to link from that page to say your SEO keywords silo pages.

The goal here is to create folders that are extremely relevant.  Each of these folders is linking back to your home page, and this structure, along with high quality unique content, will help your site gain authority with Google.  If you start mixing links without having good reason to (highly related topics and pages), it will reduce the effectiveness of this SEO silo technique.

One last thing we will look at here is how to use an .htaccess file to 301 redirect your old pages to their new location if you are overhauling an existing site.  Simply create a document in notepad and name it htaccess.  Here is the code you want to add for each page you want to redirect:

# Redirect old file path to new file path
Redirect /old-page.html http://yoursite.com/new-folder/new-page.html

Once you have added the code, upload your htaccess.doc to your site, then simply rename it in your directory, removing the .doc and adding the . in front of the htaccess name.  We suggest testing as you go along so you can correct any mistakes quickly and easily.