SEO Siloing - Improve Your Site Rankings

SEO siloing is simply structuring and interlinking a website content that allows to noticeably improve your site’s rankings.

This is one of the most advanced strategies of on-page optimisation.

Briefly, you structure your website as follows:

Category

• Subcategory
  • Article 1
  • Article 2
  • ………..
  • Article N

Each Category/Subcategory page should contain the list of all posts in this Category/Subcategory.

Each Article should link back to Category and Subcategory, to which it belongs, and other posts in the same  Category and Subcategory, but avoid linking to posts and subcategories in other categories. Confusing?

Let’s consider an example.  On this Blog I have Category Google, which contains a number of subcategories:

• Google News
• Google Search
• Google Tools
• Google Trends

If I click on the menu Item Google - it will give me all posts in all subcategories of category Google. Here, every post links back to the main Category (Google) and to its parent subcategory (e.g., Google News). It doesn’t link to any subcategories belonging to categories other than Google (unless, of course, the post belongs to several categories simultaneously *).

Also, if I click on any subcategory (e.g., Google News), it will give me only posts related to this subcategory and nothing else. Here, all posts link back to both the Google News (main subcategory) and to Google (Category) and link to all other posts in category Google, but don’t link out anywhere else **).

How do I achieve automatic SEO siloing?

There are several ways to do it. One is just to install the SEO siloing plugin. However, at the time of writing the plugin developer has not been answering in the topic for over a year and the latest version of plugin worked only for WP2.5. So if you have a newer version of Wordpress, the plugin may not operate correctly.

Therefore, to be on the safe side, I suggest another way.
You install the following plugins:

• MenuBar
• sCategory Permalink
• Similarity

Using the Menubar you make a multi-level Menu for your Blog (Categories with Subcategories - like you see on my blog) using the wpm-Suckerfish.zip template. Then by editing each post, you assign a main category to all your posts that belong to more than one category or subcategory (for other posts do nothing!).This option is empowered by the sCategory Permalinkplugin.

Make sure that for each post you tick boxes next to both it’s category and the main subcategory, whereas  the radio button is only selected next to the main subcategory. For example, for my post Google Wave - a new Era in Online Communication, whose main subcategory is Google News and additional one is SEO News, I choose the following settings:

For more details see the website for sCategory Permalink plugin.

And finally, you choose the following settings for the Similarity plugin:

Make sure that you set the Auto-display list from option into sim_by_cat mode  - this is important to avoid linking out (and thus loosing link juice) to posts in other categories.

That’s it, you are done! You blog now has a SEO Silo structure and the rankings for keywords that are in the category/subcategory titles should start improving.

Help your rankings with deep links

The last and very important thing to do - is to acquire a few deep links pointing to each of  the article pages. Of course, these deep links should have keyword(s) in the anchor text, for which the category, subcategory and the post are being optimised.

The easiest and the cheapest way to acquire deep links is to comment on dofollow blogs. You can get free lists of dofollow blogs on the Internet, but most of those lists are crap: they are out of date, most of  blogs in the list are in reality nofollow or has been converted back to nofollow, and , what is worst, nearly all of them have many tens or even hundreds of comments, which makes backlinks from them completely worthless.

Fortunately, there is a great solution to the problem - a software called Fast blog finder.  It has both Free version and Gold version.  With free version you can scan up to 50 blogs for one keyword; however, only 5-10% of those are usually dofollow, so you can find something like 5-7 dofollow blogs per keyword.

That’s of course too few to build a sensible number of links on any topics. Therefore, if you want to have a never-ending source of fresh and 100% working dofollow blogs on all possible subjects, Gold version is your smartest  choice. At the time of writing it is only $49 and has been my best investment in software over the last several years.

Footnotes:

*) In fact, this is an exception, which is no good for ranking; so, whenever possible, you should either avoid multiple categories for the same post or nofollow links to all the categories but the main one.

Standard Wordpress blog doesn’t allow you to choose that, but rather sets the category with the smallest ID to be the main one, which is often not appropriate. Fortunately, there is a plugin sCategory Permalink that allows you to choose the main category yourself. Download and install it before you do SEO siloing on your blog.

**) Again, provided that the post belongs to only one category.