What is SILO In SEO?

Hi Dears,
I've just heard about this team today while reading an article about SEO
That's Silo in SEO, what is it? and what is the SILO website structure and it has the difference with SILO in SEO?

Hiya Shirley,

Thats a great question and one which I suspect will have different interpretations and further in my opinion many people implementing it wrongly... First of all you should read up on G's hummingbird algo - as that will allow you to appreciate how G understands your website when it crawls it... In sum Silos are about creating internal links within your site with using keyword variations and semantic relations... A great example is wikipedia as they probably have the largest number of internal links which group together related content...

Now the thing with silos is to use it properly with regards to funneling link juice.... So here is an example - lets say you want to rank #1 for the keyword "red apples" on search results... Now part of that can be accomplished by trying to tell G that your site provides authoritative info on "red apples"... Here is an example:

You have category "fruit", sub category "apples" on your blog...

You create a definitive guide on "red apples" - post title "the ultimate guide to red apples..." - which is tagged with correct category/sub category - can you see the semantic relationship with this...

Next you create a bunch of other posts:
- red apples vs. green apples
- best apples in london
- the tastiest red apples
- a history of apples
- apples around the world
- etc...

For each of these posts all are tagged and further at the end or within the main body of the article you have a link back to your "red apples" post - you are then telling G that this page is really important on the topic of "red apples"....

Silos can work going down, up or sideways against your website navigation... For this example my efforts to use a silo is to improve the rankings for "red apples" for the post called "the ultimate guide to red apples..." ...

Does that make sense? Rinse and repeat for other keywords... Build those semantic relations into your site and funnel the deeply nested pages to the ones you are targeting for rankings on the serp...

Those links are important.. and G loves to follow links whether its external (inbound/outbound) or internal....

Hope that helps!

Best of Luck!

Sid

A really powerful structure I use for my blog. It's better to understand with a diagram so look at the diagram below:


The arrows on the image above represent link juice (backlinks).

This will help you rank well for your main keyword (high competition keyword), all the link juice that goes to any of your pages/posts will also be sent to the main page (homepage) or main keyword.

So to create a silo you need to have a link from your homepage linking to 3 of your main keywords. In the image above those are category 1, 2 and 3. Category 1 must link to page/post 1 and page 1 linking to page 2 then page 2 linking to page 3 and finally page 3 links back to the homepage or main keyword.

Same process with category 2 and 3. Hope I'm not confusing you

But this helps you rank your main keyword which could be highly competitive, that's the benefit. So if you send a link to any of your pages the link juice will also go to the homepage.

Let me use keywords so that you can understand it better, for instance.

Main Keyword could be "Internet Marketing" (main page). Then your categories would be Social Media Marketing (category 1), SEO (category 2), Blogging (category 3).

Then in category one you have page/post 1 which could be Facebook Marketing Tips (post 1), then have Google Plus Marketing (post 2) and finally Twitter Marketing (post 3).

Hope it makes sense, it's always better to see it in action to understand it, but hope that gives you an idea of what a silo is.

Hopefully this will help simplify the answer: 'Silo' in terms of SEO is referring to the internal linking structure of your website.

For example, let's say you are a law firm that specializes in criminal defense and personal injury law. You could proceed to build a "silo" for each of those practice areas - a "criminal defense silo" and a "personal injury silo". This would be achieved by linking all criminal defense related pages up to the top level criminal defense page, and linking all of the personal injury related pages up to the top level personal injury page.

In essence creating virtual silos within your website.

The SEO benefit comes from the tightly knit pages of content around particular topics, which builds "topical authority" and transcribes into authority (rankings in Google) for keyword phrases related to your silors.

Silo is the best on-page seo technique that allows you to double your ranking. It is a content based structure that have the knowledge of how actually the search engine bots work. It is the redistribution of link juice with in your site because all of your pages are interlinked. To better understand when one of your page gets a link, It passes links juice to the other pages on your site.