Today we are going to take a step back and look at an on site technique that can improve your rankings in Google. This technique seeks to turn your site into more of an authority site by structuring the pages and sub pages in a very orderly manner.
This technique has been around for a while, but has recently started gaining traction. It is referred to as 'siloing', and it seems to have enough merit that we are redesigning many of our existing sites to take advantage of this structure and the SEO benefits it can bring.
The basic premise of the SEO silo technique is to create a very structured site with the intention of gaining authority with the search engines. By creating folders or silos of information, all pertaining to your main topic, you can help improve not only the authority and ranking of your main page, but also increase the amount of long tail traffic your site picks up.
If you already have your site up and running, as many of us do, you may be hesitant to overhaul it. We have started overhauling many of our sites, with good to excellent results, and we can say it is well worth the time spent.
In order to not lose existing traffic or rankings, you will want to make use of an .htaccess file and 301 redirects to redirect your old pages to their new location. This is simple to do, and should not stop you from improving your site.
Getting into the nuts and bolts of this silo technique, what we are looking to do is create folders for each topic your website covers. You will need to spend a little time researching and organizing your site, topics and sub topics. You will want to sort your topics categorically. For our purposes, let’s say your site is about widgets, and you have two main topics.
You may end up with a main page on widgets, and two folders, one for indoor widgets and one for outdoor widgets. Using the silo technique, you will create a folder for each of these categories. Now, every page relating to indoor widgets will be located in the indoor widget folder. These pages will link to each other, but will not link outside of this folder. All indoor widget pages will stay in this folder, creating a silo of information about indoor widgets.
The same rules will apply to the outdoor widget folder and content pages. In this example, we only have two main categories, but for most sites, you will have many more. By creating these silos, you are telling the search engines that these folders contain highly relevant information to that specific topic. The main page for each of these categories should link to the home page of your site, but the other pages located inside that folder should only link to each other.
This allows you to build highly specific, highly authoritative folders or silos of information that relate to your main page. This is the silo technique in a very brief nutshell. Done properly, it is a powerful technique that can be a major onsite factor in helping to get your site ranked well in the search engines.
Chelle is a search engine marketer who loves to share what she knows about the topic. Visit her site to learn more about SEO siloing - http://freeinternetmarketingservices.com/SEO-siloing.htm.
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