Latest posts by Jack Falconberg (see all)
- How to Silo Your Website’s Content for Better Results - March 9, 2012
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What is a Silo?
A silo is a tall cylinder designed to store fodder on a farm.
But that’s not the type of silo I’m talking about.
In the web marketing world, a silo is a collection of themed, keyword-related content that is grouped together for efficient retrieval by search engines and visitors. Silos can change your site from a jumble of random articles to an organized collection of thematically-related information.
Benefits of Silos
Silos can help you rank well in search engines. Search engine algorithms are always evaluating page content to find the pages that are most relevant to their users. Silos make it easy for search engines to see the relationships between your pages and group them based on semantic proximity (a process called latent semantic indexing). This allows the search engines to compare your site with other sites on the same topic and identify your site as an authority in your niche.
But the benefits go beyond search. Like most effective SEO strategies, silos are helpful to your visitors. To keep your visitors on your site, you need to quickly convince them that your site has the information they are looking for. Silos do just that. They organize your site into manageable sections, allowing your visitors to quickly survey groups of related information on your site. Because your visitors can locate what they need, they are more likely to stay on your site and ultimately become a paying customer.
A Real-World Example
To make this more concrete, let’s take a look at law firm website (http://www.fortenberrylaw.com/) that I worked on recently. The firm practiced probate law in four states (Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida). We knew that visitors that were looking for information about one state would not be interested in information about another state (e.g., a person looking for information on Florida probate law would not be interested in material on Mississippi probate law). Our challenge was to silo the law firm’s content so that all of the state-specific information would be grouped with other information about that same state.
We began by dividing all of the firm’s information into four state-specific categories,
Once our silos were defined, we created five landing pages to serve as the core pages for each silo. Our goal was for each of these landing pages to serve as a mini-site within the firm’s larger website. To make this happen, we used different sidebar menus for each of the silos. Each sidebar contained links that were relevant to that particular silo.
Each of these silos becomes a “site within a site,” containing thematically-grouped information that is relevant to customers and, by extension, search engines.
How to Silo Your Website
Implementing silos on your website does not need to be difficult. In fact, if you have thoughtfully designed your site architecture, you are probably already on your way. Here are a few tips to help you further define your silos:
- Group your content by keywords, using your top keyword for the landing page to the silo. (Note: If you don’t know how to identify your top keywords, my series on keyword research will walk you through the process step-by-step.)
- Link to the landing pages from the main navigation section of your website. This may be in a header navigation menu, part of a menu bar, or (in some cases) in the sidebar to your site.
- Be sure to cross-link your information within the same silo. This would include linking from common navigation menus for that silo and cross linking from within the main content section of each page (as long as the links are contextually relevant and would make sense to your readers).
These simple steps will add a thematic structure to your website, making it more search-engine friendly and helpful to your site visitors.
Have any of you had good success with silos? I’d like to hear your thoughts.
