The new SEO – Part 2: Theming your website using Silo Structures

In part 1 of this series, I mentioned how important it is to use LSI when writing articles and content for your website.

This basically means that you’ll have to use words which are related to the overall theme of your website. So if you’re writing about how to improve your tennis game, it would be better to mention words and names like e.g. “raquet (racket)”, “slice”, “return”, “break”, “Roger Federer” and “tennis court”, too. Moreover, you should be using synonyms rather than repeating your main keywords again and again. You can’t simply just stuff your main keywords into your articles and expect to get great search engine rankings.

But it’s not all about the keywords themselves. Often, you’ll find websites which have a linking structure that is bound to “bleed” a sub-theme into several other sub-themes. This can destroy the effectivity of your overall SEO efforts.

Most Websites Have A Poor Linking Structure

What do I mean by that…?

Well, it means that the majority of sites is using a linking structure in which each page of the website can be accessed from ANY of the subpages on your website. This might be a good thing for your website visitors but with regards to SEO, it can mean the difference between getting found and ranked well and not getting anywhere near the Top 1000 of the search engine results pages for your chosen keywords.

Linking from every page to all the other pages dilutes your organizational theme of your website, thus making it very difficult for your main keywords to rank organically in the major search engines. In this regard, you’ll often find that you have great rankings for some general keywords (which are probably not even related to your topic) and that you have bad rankings for your specific keyword terms.

This usually happens when you’re utilizing a poor page to page linking strategy…

Theme Density On Single Pages Is Not Enough

Theme density is how many related words appear in connection with the subject of a web page that is determined to be relevant by the search engines. Google’s latest LSI algorithm is able to catch spammy content and thus it will lower it in the ranks. The days of Keyword Density Analysis are over. Now it’s all about theme density.

Having LSI keywords appear on a single web page is not sufficient, though. Theme density needs to be incorporated into your entire website. This means that your whole site structure needs to reflect your overall theme and not just your individual pages. The best way to ensure that this is being put into practice is by structuring your website into what is called “silo structures”.

The Solution: Create Your Websites Using “Silos”

When you’re using LSI on your website in combination with a silo structure, you will automatically enhance both the theme of individual pages within the silo and the silo itself. Each silo is a sub-theme of your main niche topic and should be completely separated from your other sub-themes.

It’s very important that the silos will never link to an individual sub-page of one of your other silos. But the last article page (or product page) within a silo can link to the index page of the next silo.

The graphic below will make this clearer (see below for a silo structured website on Electronics):

The index page links to several sub-themes, the silos, but it doesn’t link to pages within the actual silos. The index page of a silo has one or more links to sub-silos (which are silo index pages again). From the last index page, you have only links related to product pages/article pages which are related to the current sub-theme. And each article is linking to the next one.

The last product page in each silo links to the next silo index page until there are no more silos left. The only other link you could put onto these internal pages would be a link to the homepage itself to make navigation for your visitors a little easier. The second main silo (digital cameras – in blue) would be built in the same way and would not have links to the other main silos.

Using these techniques when structuring your website and by using LSI on your content pages, you are set to beat up to 90% of competitors in your chosen niche (presupposed you’re getting at least some backlinks to your site)!

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SPECIAL OFFER FOR MY SUBSCRIBERS:

I’m about to offer a service which will be putting these SEO principles into practice for you so you don’t have to….

Before offering something like that, I need to know how many people would be interested in this. Let me tell you that SEO companies who are actually applying these principles charge A LOT of money ($697+) for creating these kind of websites!

My offer would be that I create a website for you with up to 25 pages in total at an unbeatable price of just $197/site incl. 1 year of free hosting (my subscribers only – others will soon have to pay at least $397 for it). You can supply me with your content which you want to have used for the site or you can choose 1 of hundreds of private label article packs (with at least 25 articles to fill the site) that you’ll be able to choose from starting tomorrow.

If you’re interested in this, then please go to my helpdesk and let me know that you’re interested and which topic you’d like to have a site on. ( Use “I am interested in your silo-structured websites” as your subject line for the ticket.)

I will only offer this service if there’s enough interest in it – so the more helpdesk tickets there are, the more likely it is that you can get a site. The number of spots will be very limited as this is eating up a lot of my time. There won’t be more than 12 sites built!

Please also tell me in your helpdesk ticket if you want me to do the basic promotion as well so I can plan how much outsourcing will be needed! The basic package price will probably be in the $147 region but I have not decided on that, yet…

The sites will be built using XSite Pro 2 which is simply the perfect tool for creating websites based on LSI and Silo principles! Silo structured websites don’t need a lot of promotion to get great search engine rankings but the more you are doing, the better the rankings, of course. (I’ll also offer a basic package for the promotion of these websites which includes directory submissions and social bookmarking)

Sites will be built on a first come, first serve basis…