Chapter 1
In This Chapter
In Book II, Chapter 4, we briefly discuss siloing, which is a way of arranging your website according to themes that allows for prime search engine optimization. In this chapter, we go into the meat and bones of siloing.
Siloing your site is one of the most important things you can do for search engine optimization. It organizes your website so that a search engine (and a user) can get a good, clear picture of who you are and what you’re about. A non-siloed site versus a siloed one is like the difference between having a bookcase with books and DVDs and CDs and knickknacks all crammed onto the same shelf versus a bookcase with books on one shelf, CDs on another, DVDs on a third, and knickknacks on the fourth. It’s easier to figure out where things are on the organized bookcase versus the messy bookcase.
In this chapter, we discuss how to build categories and themes for your website and how to incorporate those into your silos. We also discuss how links to your site from others support your site’s relevance in the eyes of search engines.
You can do many things to your website to provide evidence of subject relevance. One of these things is understanding what it means to theme a website. Theming is grouping website content in a manner that matches the way people search. One site can have many themes. Each theme can have sub-themes. In our example classic-car customization site, the main theme is customizing classic cars; a sub-theme is restoration of classic Mustangs.
In order to rank for your keywords within Google, Yahoo, and Bing, your website has to provide information that is organized in clear language that the search engines can understand. When your information has had all its design and layout stripped away, is it still the most relevant information when compared to other sites? If so, you have a pretty good chance of achieving high rankings and, in turn, attracting users looking for those products and services. In order to do so, you have to be thinking about the following things:
The subject themes your website can legitimately rank for.
False advertising is always a bad idea.
As you see throughout this book, we often explain the importance of creating silos for your subject themes by using the analogy that most websites are like a jar of marbles. Search engines can only decipher the meaning of a website when the subjects are clear and distinct. Take a look at the picture of the jar of marbles in Figure 1-1 and think about how search engines would classify the theme(s) of the jar.
In the jar, you can see black marbles, gray marbles, and white marbles all mixed together with seemingly no order or emphasis. You can reasonably assume that search engines would classify the only theme as “marbles.”
If you then separate each group of colored marbles into separate jars (or sites) as in Figure 1-2, they would be classified as a jar of black marbles, a jar of white marbles, and a jar of gray marbles. Now your site could rank for the narrow terms [black marbles], [white marbles], and [gray marbles], but you would be lucky to rank for the generic term [marbles].
If you wanted to keep all three types of marbles together in a single jar (or keep various topics on your website) and go after the very important generic term, you would go about creating distinct silos or categories within the jar (or site) that would allow the subject themes to be [black marbles], [white marbles], [gray marbles], and finally the generic term [marbles], as in Figure 1-3.
Most websites never clarify the main subjects they want their site to be relevant for. Instead, they try to be all things to all people and wind up with a jumbled mess.
The goal for your site, if you want to rank for more than a single generic term, is to selectively decide what your site is and is not about. Rankings often are damaged in two major ways: by including irrelevant content or by having too little content for a subject on a website.
So what subject themes are you currently ranking for?
The best places to start to identify which themes are your most relevant are your keyword research and the data from your website. You can start by examining the data from the following sources:
Each of these sources of information can provide the history of who visits the website and why. They won't tell you why the site isn't ranked for desired keywords directly, but they help you understand what keyword phrases your site currently ranks for organically and which visitors find your site relevant.
You have several ways to obtain the data or logs for the search engine spider history and the footprints of visitors to your site. First off, you may go right to the source and download the actual log files from your server using FTP. If your server comes with a free log file analyzer, you can use that, or you can use a program like Webtrends (www.webtrends.com
) or dozens of other desktop applications that help decipher Internet traffic data. Many businesses also use on-demand services that use cookies and JavaScript to pull live data on the patterns of search engines and visitors. These businesses do so through online services like the exceptionally powerful Google Analytics (www.google.com/analytics
), which is a free service. However you access the data history, you are looking for information on how users came to your site. Book VIII focuses on web analytics and guides you through many of your options.
You can also find clues to the words that your current site is relevant for by evaluating the words that you bid on with pay per click programs offered by all major search engines. Often, companies bid on words that they would like to be relevant for within the organic search arena, but that for one reason or another they have not yet achieved ranking success.
The last and most accessible method of discovering your website's most important subject themes is to find out which keyword phrases rank the pages within the site best. What phrases are pulling people to your website? Running a keyword monitor and checking your web analytics program reports and server logs for the most-trafficked pages on your site, and using the search engines’ webmaster tools are ways to discover which queries are already bringing you traffic. The Search Queries report under Search Traffic in Google Search Console (https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/home
) lists the top queries bringing traffic to your site from Google searches, along with stats for impressions (how often your result is seen by a searcher), clicks to your site from that query, and your site’s average ranking on a results page for that keyword. In Bing Webmaster Tools, you find a comparable report in the Reports & Data section under Search Keywords.
Obviously these aren't the only terms that you'll want to focus on in your SEO campaign, but they are important to optimize for so that you don't lose the traffic they're already bringing you. Pair them with your new keyword list when you do your organization. See Book V, Chapter 3 for more on creating keyword lists.
After creating a starter list of 10 to 100 keyword terms that appear to be most relevant to your company's product or services, it's time to begin keyword research. During the process of keyword research, the first goal is to grow that keyword list as large as possible. Cover as many relevant subjects that can be remotely connected to the website’s subject themes as you can. Use Trellian’s Keyword Discovery tool (www.keyworddiscovery.com
) or Wordtracker (www.wordtracker.com
) to identify keywords and synonyms that are related to the site's subject matter. Another excellent tool is the Google AdWords Keyword Planner tool (https://adwords.google.com/KeywordPlanner
). Refer to Book II for the nitty-gritty on keyword research techniques.
After you answer the question of where the site currently ranks by running your keyword monitor or analytics tool, you know two major factors: the phrases for which your site ranks and the phrases for which it doesn’t rank in the search engines. The next challenge is to understand what subjects your site is legitimately relevant to and why you are ranked as you are currently.
A great place to begin is to run Page Analyzer within the SEOToolSet. SEOToolSet Lite includes the full-featured Page Analyzer tool and is free for sign up at SEOToolSet.com. Page Analyzer reveals the density, distribution, and frequency of keyword phrases used throughout the page (for more information on measuring keywords, see Book III, Chapter 2). By running the main pages of your site through this tool, you can begin to identify whether the major themes are used throughout the titles, Meta tags, headings, Alt attributes, and body content. If your terms are absent, make a note that the keyword densities seem low. Evaluate how often a phrase is repeated in each major category element and take note of the commonly repeated phrases and infrequently repeated phrases. Are all the terms concentrated only near the top of the pages? If so, make a note that the distribution of the keywords could stand to be more spread out. Don’t bunch them all together.
SEOToolSet Pro subscribers can use the Multi-Page Analyzer to further help their siloing efforts. After evaluating, if the pages throughout your site contain keyword rich densities, compare your pages to that of the top ten competitors for your major keyword terms. Using Multi-Page Analyzer, you are given a report that summarizes why the competitors’ sites ranked highly and recommends how to adjust your own pages to have keyword densities similar to those of the top-ranked sites.
As we describe in the preceding sections of this chapter, you need to know what you are ranked for and what you’re considered to be relevant for, and hopefully you will have performed some analysis on the data you gathered so you can determine why your competition ranks the way they do. But even if you’ve taken care of all that, you’re still not done. For each keyword phrase you’ve identified, you need to make a decision: Is it worth the work to write dozens of pages of content to rank for a subject you don’t already rank for? To make this decision, consider whether your site is really about that theme and whether adding more content about the subject could make your site become less relevant for more important terms. You do not want to dilute your site. You need to sit down and figure out whether you’re willing to make the commitment to establish a theme and do the work required.
Or you can use a simple bulleted list, like this:
Creating an organization flow chart is a third way to lay out your subject themes visually. The Organization Chart is an easily accessible tool that can be found within Microsoft Visio, or you can use another organization chart–creation software program. Using one of these visual representations of your themes and subtopics (outline, bulleted list, or organization chart) provides the opportunity to visually explain to others involved in the website what the focus of the website should be and what subjects actually serve to distract the search engines from the main subjects.
After completing this exercise, ask yourself what keyword phrases users actually type into the search engines when looking for this information. This helps in organizing your broad phrases for the large, traffic-heavy pages for your site and the smaller, more specialized phrases that go on your sub-pages.
After you have your main themes and subtopics laid out on paper (or on the computer screen), you can start organizing and laying out your website content into subject silos. You may have a good landing page (a page that users come to from clicking a search result or an outbound link from another site) for each main topic; if you don’t, put creating landing pages at the top of your list. Next, you want to make sure you have enough subtopic content, or sub-pages, to support each main topic. You also want to make sure that every page’s content is focused on its particular theme. In other words, it’s time to start arranging your website into silos.
One way to visualize a silo is to think of a pyramid structure. Look at Figure 1-5 and notice the top tier. That’s a landing page, which has the big broad terms you want to be ranking for. The pages underneath it are the supporting pages, which are the smaller subcategories you came up with to support the main term.
The top page receives the most support (and hopefully the most traffic) because it’s the most relevant and focused page about its particular subject. Your site proves that it’s the most important by the way it’s structured, with supporting pages under the top page, and by the way its links are set up. The way you set up your site should tell the search engines exactly what each page is about and which is the most important page for each keyword theme.
One way you can do your siloing is to link in the same pattern as your directory structure. (The directory structure refers to the arrangement of the folders where your website files physically reside.) When you upload files to your site, you place them in a directory. A siloed directory structure has a top-level folder for each main topic, subfolders within each main-topic folder for its related subtopics, and individual pages inside each subfolder (as shown in Figure 1-6). Linking then naturally follows this structure, effectively reinforcing your directories through links.
When building a directory structure, be sure not to go too deep. For example, take a look at the URL of the page. The full address is the directory of where the page is. Observe:
http://www.customclassics.com/ford/mustang/index.html
The URL lets you know where the page is. Notice how the page named index.html is saved within the folder named mustang, which is a subfolder of the main directory ford. This page is only two levels deep in the site structure, which is good.
Too many levels of subdirectories can have the following negative effects:
For example, our classic car website only has one main directory level (the car’s make) and two directory levels of subcategories (model and year). The directory could look something like this:
http://www.customclassics.com/ford/delrio/index.html
http://www.customclassics.com/ford/delrio/1957.html
http://www.customclassics.com/ford/delrio/1956.html
http://www.customclassics.com/ford/fairlane/index.html
http://www.customclassics.com/ford/fairlane/1958.html
http://www.customclassics.com/ford/fairlane/1959.html
http://www.customclassics.com/ford/mustang/index.html
http://www.customclassics.com/ford/mustang/1965.html
http://www.customclassics.com/ford/mustang/1966.html
Note how shallow the directory structure is: No page is more than three directory levels away from the root.
The other thing to keep in mind when working with physical siloing is the difference between absolute and relative linking. A fully qualified link provides the entire URL within the link, and a relative link is only linked to a file within the current directory. A fully qualified link looks like this:
<a href="http://www.classiccars.com/ford/mustang/tireoptions.html">
A root-relative link looks like this:
<a href="/ford/mustang/tireoptions.html">
And a directory-relative link looks like this:
<a href="tireoptions.html">
When you use a relative link, it’s only going to work in relation to the current directory (or the next directory up, if you use slash characters relative to the root of the site). So a link to tireoptions.html works only if there’s a file called tireoptions.html for it to link to in the same directory as the file you are linking from.
With fully qualified linking, there is no confusion about where the file is located and what it is about. A fully qualified link has the added bonus of being very clear for the search engine to follow. Fully qualified links allow the search engine spider to have the full address when it follows a link and ensures that the pages being linked to can be found and indexed when the spider returns in the future. Using relative links, or using links that are not fully qualified, can send the spider to a wrong page. Fully qualified links make links easier to maintain and ensure that the search engine spider can always follow them.
You may have your website directories currently set up in a non-siloed structure, with thousands of files and hundreds of folders already in place. Or, you may need to maintain a directory structure that does not reflect your site theme for some other reason. Never fear: As with most difficulties, you can use a technical solution that still lets you silo your site and achieve better search engine optimization.
You can make the theme of your web pages clear to the search engines even if you do not follow your directory structure, so long as you connect your pages on the same theme through internal linking. This is virtual siloing.
Here’s how to think about it in the simplest terms possible: The Internet is a series of web pages connected by hyperlinks. A website is a part of the great Internet soup, being both a member of the whole vast network and an individual group of pages unique unto itself. What search engines attempt to do is collect information from individual sites into content groups: “This site means this, and that other site means that, and so forth.” They try to determine every site’s content and give the content a category. Search engines award the websites that have the most complete subject relevance with high rankings for those keywords.
The difference between physical siloing and virtual siloing is that in physical siloing, it’s about how you set up your directory structure and links. Virtual siloing is about setting up your links regardless of your directory structure. In virtual siloing, the following are your tools:
The anchor text for a link tells the search engine what the page that’s being linked to is about. Clicking a link that says “tires” should take you to a page about tires. Because if the page is about tires, and the anchor text says it’s about tires, and any other links to that page all contain the word tires (or synonyms of tires), that creates a giant blinking neon arrow to tell the search engine that that particular page is about tires. Anchor text is the hyperlinked text that explains what the link is and what the page it is linking to is about. It sometimes helps to think of anchor text as your ability to vote for what keyword phrase the target page should rank for.
The last part of virtual siloing is building subject relevance using the navigation and on-page elements of your website. This means arranging the main subjects in the most straightforward way possible in order to build subject relevance, and organizing your navigation menus to categorize the content of your site. Remember the pyramid that we tell you about at the beginning of the chapter? The broader terms are supported by the lesser terms, and the lesser terms are supported by the even lesser terms, and so forth.
Every silo needs to be assigned a main landing page focused on that silo’s primary subject theme. The landing page should have a substantial amount of supporting pages. Supporting pages can also have supporting pages. Linking should stay within the silos or point to other important landing pages. Look at Figure 1-7, which shows a graph of a silo with one big broad page and five smaller subcategory pages, each with its own attached supporting pages.
You can also use a couple of tricks with cross-linking in order to keep the links streamlined, but they should be used sparingly. If you must cross-link theme-supporting pages (not landing pages), you may want to add the rel="nofollow" attribute to a link to keep the search engine from following the link. This allows unrelated pages to link to each other without confusing the subject relevance. Alternatively, you can use one of the methods we talk about in the following section on excessive cross-linking.
Your outbound links are the links that you have going out of your site. Having outbound links to resources and experts in your industry that help your visitors is important. Also, such links show the search engines that you recognize who the other experts in your industry are and helps the search engines define your site by association. Here are some aspects to keep in mind for your outbound links:
Inbound linking (also called backlinks) is perhaps the most well known and often discussed of the link structure elements in search engine optimization. These backlinks are the links that point into your site from an outside website. You might be saying to yourself, “Hold up, I can’t control what people say about me.” That is true, to an extent. However, you can encourage supporters and people interested in spreading the word about you to add a mention of your site to their personal or even company websites by generally being an awesome resource.
Link building, the process of attracting inbound links, is covered in depth in Chapter 3 of this minibook, but here are a few different ways to solicit links to your site:
When we say link magnets, we mean elements on your site that you build in such a way that people naturally want to link to them. Much like a magnet attracts iron filings, these site-content elements simply attract links. People happen upon your site, find the link magnet, and decide that it’s relevant and worthy of a link, so they stick a link to your content on their site. This happens because someone finds your page both useful and interesting — and it’s a process that happens over time. But it means that the link is generally going to be from someone who is actually interested in your industry, not just in your gimmick. Remember, search engines judge you based on your expertise, and good quality links from relevant sites add to that.
Link bait is an accelerated version of a link magnet. Link bait is anything that is deliberately provocative in order to get someone to link to you. Examples would be a cartoon that someone did of your boss, or a video depicting wacky hi-jinks in your office that was linked to by a few well-read blogs.
Link bait, unlike link magnets, is usually more broadly appealing in scope and probably won't appeal solely to your core market. Like any other non-relevant link, a link generated from link bait is often not one that would be considered a high quality link in general. But it does have the bonus of bringing a lot of traffic to your site, and hopefully a few of those visitors may poke around your site and decide to give you a permanent link.
By ad link buying, we don’t mean going out and selling or buying links to your own site for SEO link-building purposes. There are two loose groupings of link buying: buying advertising for traffic purposes but not for SEO, which is acceptable, and buying a link for SEO purposes that is not a qualified testimonial, which is considered deceptive and if detected could result in a spam penalty.
Acceptable link buying is paying for a link on someone’s advertising site. You must do it strictly for advertising and traffic purposes only, and not for link popularity. Google doesn’t like to consider paid links and does not assign weight to a paid link. Paid links may pass some value until detected, but after they’re detected, you lose all SEO value and could incur a penalty. If you do have a paid link on someone else’s site, ask that person to place a rel="nofollow" attribute on it. This attribute alerts the search engines that link equity should not be passed via that link. This is also important because if Google discovers a sold link on the site, it might stop passing link equity to all the links on the site. Read Chapter 3 of this minibook for the important technical requirements you’ll want to do to make sure your paid advertising links are search engine approved.
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