How to Create a Silo Structure on Your Website
Many businesses rely on their website content to increase traffic, create engagement, and drive conversions. It is essential then to organize web content through siloing. Siloing the structure of a website is a powerful way to make it easier for users to navigate through your content.
You can support and boost your SEO efforts with silo structures that will definitely improve user experience, and enhance your site or blog SEO. It is a clear strategy that will help you build structured content that links across your site.
We will guide you through this strategy of restructuring your site so that you will see improved chances of ranking higher across major search engines and earning greater authority for the right keywords.
What is Website Siloing?
Soloing is a process that involves grouping together related pages using an architectural structure or link-based hierarchy.
In SEO, website siloing is sorting and organizing your web silo just like how products along a grocery aisle are organized. When you sort and organize the content on your website, it will be easier for your users to locate products and/or services. This will likewise help them understand better what new products are used for or the purposes of new services that you are offering.
How Does Siloing Work For a Website?
Website siloing is an internet marketing strategy that utilizes the desired search term to improve the relevance of your page.
It strategically creates links used within sections of your site passing PageRank between closely related pages and landing pages. These links reinforce your website’s primary topics.
This is important because search engines closely review the structure of your website to determine the primary topics of your site and whether your content contains sufficient keywords. Siloing will establish your website’s keyword-based topical authority.
When you have quality content with relevant keywords, organized into a silo structure, search engines will be able to identify your website and rank it higher.
How To Silo Structure Your Website for SEO
Siloing allows you to create content groupings and internal link structures so that search engine bots will interact with your site.
This can impact your crawl budget and overall rankings because search engines can easily understand what your website is all about.
There are generally two ways in website siloing:
- Organizational silo involves organizing the content of your website into classifications according to topics that will create pockets of relevancy across your site. Even if you have content with different kinds of topics, you can still rank for each of the topics.
- Link silo involves how you leverage internal links between content. Search engine spiders use these links to crawl from one web page to another. When you generate links
to your website, you are typically improving your authority, trust, and ranking power.
Although there is no single perfect way to link your content, the strategy of linking content with your website will benefit you in these ways:
- More pages will be crawled to your site
- Link juice from inbound links will be distributed across more pages
- Additional ranking signals through the use of anchor text
3 techniques to linking your content:
Power Page silo
You can use internal links to distribute the power of your inbound links that should point at content like blog posts, infographics, and the like. Follow these steps:
- Go to Google Webmaster Tools (GWT)
- 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. You will be able to identify your link-deficient pages.
Be careful not to over-optimize your anchor text when you are building external links because you might trigger a penalty. When you are building links within your pages, it is good practice to:
Be more aggressive with your anchor text
Use exact match keyword phrases
If you do so you will be able to pass link juice, and thus, ranking power to other pages through internal links in your pages.
Category Silo
When you have blogs with taxonomies in your web content, this method works best so that you will rank on local pages. Follow these steps:
- Create categories on your blog based on the terms you would like to rank for
- Create valuable content for each category and make sure that you make your content hyper-specific to that category
- Link category posts together using anchor texts related to your keywords
- Link category posts to the target page with exact match anchor texts. Be careful not to overuse them.
Circle Silo
If you want to create massive relevant signals to search engines, you can use this technique. Create a circular silo of blog posts that will link directly around a silo page. Here’s how to do it:
- Create a number of blog posts about a singular topic related to your target silo page
- Link each blog post to another blog post that is within the content silo
- Link back each blog post to the silo page
- Link blog posts to only one silo page. Refrain from linking to other silo pages because this will break the cycle of relevancy
- Do this process for every silo page that you are aiming to rank
5 Simple Steps to Create a Website Silo
When it comes to blogging, there is a process of organizing related information together through siloing which you can do before you launch your website. You can follow these steps to silo your site effectively:
- Download a list of your blog posts. You can use the Export any WordPress data to XML/CSV plugin when you export your published posts as a CSV file.
- Create a spreadsheet in Google Sheets where you can import the CSV file that you exported from your website. Create a column labeled ‘content silos’.
- Categorize the blog posts according to single topic clusters. This means you will assign each blog post to a content silo. Then sort the table and group the blogs by content silo.
- Use WordPress categories to create interlinked content silos based on topic clusters. Create internal links from each page in the content silo back to the category page.
- Create internal links by following the steps mentioned earlier in a previous topic.
Boosting Website SEO Through Silo Structuring Your Site
Now that you know how silo structures can impact your website growth, consider strategies to organize and restructure your site. Create a clear strategy that will present your site’s primary topics with sufficient keyword-supporting content.
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