Sticking with the farming theme from my last post, today I’d like to cover using silos in your SEO strategy. I think it’s been too long since anyone’s talked about silos, and I find it to be a crucial SEO best practice. Silos refer to the way in which you organize and group your site content. In other words, you want each page of your site to have ‘themed,’ keyword-relevant content. If you haven’t been using silos to organize your site’s keywords, content, and architecture – or you’re not familiar at all with this concept – here’s a rundown of why to use them:

In my opinion, that alone is reason enough to utilize silos when putting together content for your site. But, here are some more reasons if you’re on the fence:

• Keep it friendly: As an SEO, your job is to make a site friendly to both search engines and users. Using silos helps you do both! For search engines, silos basically allow you to help them understand the theme of each page, and this can even help you rank better for long-tail terms because the search engines will be better able to recognize your authority on a specific topic. For users, it’s simple: you need to quickly convince them that your site is where they want to be and you offer what they’re looking for. When each page of your site is easy to navigate and easy to understand, there’s a better chance they’ll stay on your site!
• Be the authority: When each page of your site is highly organized and has relevant content, the search engines will consider your site an authority on that product or topic. Keep in mind that search engines are looking for keywords on each page as well as how relevant your content is to keywords.
• Focus inbound links: If you organize your content into keyword-rich themes for each page, this will help you focus on and distribute your links to the page content that will get the most benefit.
• Increase your rankings: The result of all of these is better rankings on the SERPs! And who doesn’t want that??

So How Do You Create Silos?

At Hanapin Marketing, we consider siloing a best practice when creating a site structure (you can also check out a great post on SEOmoz about site architecture!). As you’ve read, there are too many benefits to having highly themed, keyword-rich pages to not use silos. Search engines will love you more, users will love you more, and clients will love you more for helping their site rank higher!

There are three types of silos (and we recommend that you use all three):

Ultimately, silos really are crucial to a great SEO strategy (…and they’re a little bit common sense, too). Utilizing silos will make your site more search engine and user friendly, you’ll be able to focus inbound links, and you can become an authority on your product/service – all while improving your page rank! When done right, silos will improve your site.

This year’s conversation occurred Saturday afternoon in the lobby at IUPUI after the event was over. Just me, Douglas Karr, and Chad Pollitt.

They were talking about real estate clients they’ve had in the past and how they used a multiple domain strategy instead of an all-in-one or even a subdomain strategy.

Their reason: keyword dilution
Their results: clients’ sites outranked those big aggregator sites and received a good ROI

And it got me thinking about my company’s redesign.

For fear of giving too much of a plug, I work at a place that Karr describes as an “all in one shop.” We offer the big three:  IT & Support, Custom [web] Development and Marketing & Design. To the casual observer, all those services sound related. But upon further review, you realize that those segments, despite the fact they all relate to online activities, are night and day from each other.

And this is coming from someone who confesses to being too broad in initial keyword targeting. “Test it and see what happens,” is usually the motto I hide behind because I”m afraid of missing potential opportunities.

But now they have me that afraid of keyword dilution.

What Is Keyword Dilution

Keyword dilution happens when the spectrum of keywords on a page / site are so unrelated that not only do they fail to cross-optimize but they dilute each other’s impact on the site. For example, in theory, “Zen” and “the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,” [title “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” is a book written by Robert Pirsig] would be such contrasting concepts that if both were written about on a site would their impact, in essence, detract from each other. And if you did “Zen,” “Art,” and “Motorcycle Maintenance,” …well, you get the picture.

Pending your keywords and present [and future] competition, having such anchors will hinder your ability to reach your target audience.

If you have a site that has contrasting themes, consider the following strategies:

Multiple domains. Now, be careful. If you link too many of them all together you run the risk of link farms.

Subdomains. I can’t believe I’m saying this out loud, but because the three sections can be so different, using the subdomains can help show solidarity and differences. Pending on algorithm changes, splitting the site into corporateurl.com and three subdomains – “it”, “development”, “design,” – will allow each section to be their own site and my boss gets his microsites while still getting about 25% of the privilege of a corporate URL’s subfolder.

Now our upcoming blogging strategy becomes more of a niche blogging strategy. The blog posts can now be higher up in the site architecture. And we now can better target our keyword strategies.

A little 301 nightmare is forthcoming, but in the end it should be worth the effort.

I can’t wait for my old partner-in-crime to read this one. “I told you so!” followed by “Sure, if Doug says it…”

(And I reserve the right to change my mind, again)
What steps do you take to avoid keyword dilution?

301 Permanent Redirects

Using permanent 301 redirects is the best practice for duplicate content. Google recommends using 301 redirects whenever possible, even if you have to call your webhost to set up the redirects for you. Amber has also written a post regarding the benefits of 301 redirects. But, when that option isn’t available, what is the next best practice? Or, what if you know that the content is a duplication, but you’d like to keep the page(s) live?

Robots.txt

If you are unfamiliar with a robots.txt file, Pat wrote a great article that dissects each part of a robots.txt. If you’d like to keep your content live, this was one option that you would have. You can essentially tell the search engines to not index or not allow a search engine bot to look at the page. This option keeps the page live, but it also removes the page from a search engine’s index. Well, what if you’d like to have the best of both worlds; keep a page live and indexed by the search engines?

Canonical Link Tag

Your content may not be unique for any number of reasons. There are also endless reasons why you may not be able to use 301 redirects or a roboots.txt file. The important thing is that there is a third option.

Last February, Google and other search engines created rules regarding canonical tags and how you can use them. Basically, if you can’t at all use redirects to eliminate duplicate content, you can use the link tag rel=”canonical” to mark duplicate content (ex. <link rel=”canonical” href=”…../index.html”> in the <head> of the duplicate pages. There’s been additional clarification on this subject, stating that you can add the link tag to the <head> of the original page, as well as the duplicate pages.

I should state that the first two options are always preferred. Don’t get carried away with creating duplicate content and canonical tagging those pages. It’s more or less a last option, just like the order of this article. Google has a nice summary of cross-domain duplicate content options available to you. You have the tools to clean your site’s duplicate content up, now go do it!

What is Information Architecture?

You’ve probably heard the term before. You also have probably heard a definition for it, or have one of your own. From my experiences, information architecture definitions often vary from person to person. In terms of our discussion, information architecture will refer to the organization of online content into groups and the associated creation of a folder structure or end-user navigation.

Why is Information Architecture so important?

The benefits are clear. Having an organized and hierarchical folder structure can allow you to efficiently perform maintenance to your site. This is also part of Amber’s 10 Ways to Build Your Website with SEO in Mind. There are few things more frustrating to a web developer than having to work with an unorganized site, or at least a site they don’t understand the structure of. Likewise, developing a clear end-user navigation ensures that your users will quickly find what they are looking for. But these aren’t the only audiences that will use your site. You’ll need to consider how a search engine will interpret your architecture.

Think of your URL as one long keyword, for example:

www.hardware-site.com/fasteners/screws/phillips/1-inch/.

A user will have a much easier time finding that page through search because the content is hierarchically organized and contains the right descriptive keywords for the folder names. A site could similarly be organized as follows, with a user ultimately having to browse a page full of many types of screws:

www.hardware-site.com/fasteners/screws/

This same logic applies to your navigation. Allowing users to narrow down their queries via your navigation allows them to also see all of the options available in an organized structure, rather than many types of a product on a page.

A site may also attempt to rely on their site search functions to deliver users to the correct content, but if their site isn’t correctly organized they are purely relying on keywords. In this case, the information architecture can help sculpt search results and deliver content to users that might not otherwise find it. Conversely, you can also help to eliminate irrelevant results that only appear because they have a few of the right keyword combinations. Organizing content with the correct architecture points the search engine in the right direction as to what is relevant to the search query.

Give your search, internally and externally, an advantage with the right structure and information architecture.

The purpose of doing this is to get those pages you deem higher in value to rank higher in the search engines. The higher your PageRank is for a particular page, in theory the higher that page should rank in the search engines.

Apparently, some have debated how well this practice works, or if it works at all.. Regardless, last week at SMX Advanced, according to Search Engine Land, Matt Cutts said that PageRank sculpting no longer works to help flow more PageRank to the more valuable pages of your site. , This means if you have a great PageRank on your homepage, adding in nofollow tags or using other methods of blocking less valuable pages on your site no longer helps give other pages any more PageRank.

Here is a before and after analogy that Search Engine Land uses to help explain the situation:

Before: Imagine authority is money, and a particular page has $10 in “authority” to spend. It links out to 10 pages, so each of those pages gets $1 ($10 divided by 10). If it links to 20 pages, each gets 50 cents ($10 divided by 20). If it links to 5 pages, each page gets $2.

After:  if you have $10 in authority to spend on those ten links, and you block 5 of them, the other 5 aren’t going to get $2 each. They’re still getting $1. It’s just that the other $5 you thought you were saving is now going to waste.

Search Engine Land goes onto say that if you have used the PageRank sculpting strategy in the past, not to panic and remove your nofollow tags. Google will not be penalizing anyone using this strategy anytime soon according to Matt Cutts.

My advice, until all of this gets situated and Google figures out exactly what they’re doing, work on other SEO strategies like link building, writing new content, etc. over doing any further PageRank sculpting.

When I talk to business owners about SEO options and tips, this is the one topic that makes them uncomfortable, squirmy and withdrawn.  One day I’ll just stop them and say “Ok, what? What is it? What’s wrong? Why are you edging to the door?”  I would expect that reaction from a spam campaign suggestion, not something as wholesome as clean architecture.

I’m guessing some don’t want to “change” their site for the better.  They may have spent thousands on a site that doesn’t generate any leads and tampering with the site may admit defeat.  Rather than view it as defeat, it should be viewed as a learning mechanism to move on to the next level. So before the cringing begins, here are three quick architecture tips to help you view your site in a new way – as a tool to quickly inform your visitors and as a way for the search bots to index your site easily.

1. List your topics

Each site for a company, organization or person can be and should be split into different categories on what the site is about.  This is beyond the About us, Contact Us and Products/Services pages.  If you offer auto repair services, there should be main topics based on the main systems of the car (electrical, mechanical, etc) or by basic car part (engine, tires, lights, steering, brakes).  Some would say that your topics should be based around keyword research.  While that could help, it is most important that your topics are groups together in ways that are easy to understand.

Brakes

• Rotors
• Pads
• Grinding
• ABS
• Emergency

Tires

• Tread-type
• Weather-specific
• Rotation
• Spare

Lights

• Headlights
• Turn singles
• Brake Lights
• Overhead/Dashboard/Fuses

In this example, writing about Emergency Brakes can naturally link to the dashboard lights.

2. Organize your topics with original content

This is where you can really make your business shine.  You can write your own experience onto your own site.  It doesn’t matter if you’re not a polished author. In fact, that might be a bonus.  There are many sites that offer articles you can purchase and place on your site, but I recommend staying away from those places.  If a similar article is purchased 20 or 200 different times for 20 to 200 different sites around the web, your site will not be seen as unique by the search engines – and that’s not good.

3. Clear, Consistent, Straightforward Navigation

Simply put: People should be able to see where they need to go on every page.  If you choose horizontal navigation or vertical navigation, it should be consistent throughout the site.  CMS sites are good about this.

These are only three out of a whole score of tips on what makes a good architectured site. I chose these tips to emphasize the importance of having something worthwhile on your site that is unique and that shows your visitors you know your stuff. Content on your site grouped logically that has consistant navigation will put your site in a wonderful position that will help your visitors and search bots to go through your site.

What Content Should Be on My Site?

At this time you may be scratching your head wondering “ok, what content should I have? Do I just talk about my business to the point that I’m sick of it?”  True.  Your business is a business, not a repository of encyclopedic articles, but that does not mean you have nothing to write about.  The market your business is in should provide more than enough to talk about.  Rather than just advertise that you provide a product or service, you should expand your site to include why it is important.  This pontificating on all aspects of a subject or niche is called Thought Leadership.

Even if you don’t feel like a thought leader, you will find that almost any topic or niche can be broken into subtopics and those subtopics can have articles, blog posts, or landing pages devoted to that subtopic.  For instance, if my main site was patio furniture, I would want my home page extolling the virtues of patio furniture and why everyone should buy patio furniture through me.  Subtopics could include:

• Types of patio furniture
• Caring for patio furniture
• Materials used in patio furniture

With each of these subtopics, the interest can be drilled down further:

• Types of patio furniture -> Chairs, tables, umbrellas, awnings, swings, etc …
• Caring for patio furniture -> Sunlight Exposure, Night Storage, Winter Care, etc …
• Materials used in patio furniture -> Wood, Metal, Plastic, Wicker, etc …

Because you are a Thought Leader now, you can give your advice on which is better in certain circumstances … wood or plastic? And what I should remember about my metal table during winter storage?

How Do I Position This Content on My Site?

Arranging your content in themes is also called Siloing and it is very friendly to the search engines.  Siloing your content helps keep you from being vague.  Vague words of ”concepts” and “product” and “process” and the techie favorites, “solutions” and “systems,” are ways to get out of saying anything tangible so that no one can be totally pinned on anything.  People will probably not type in “Outdoor Relaxation and Entertainment Concepts” into Google when looking for “Patio furniture.”

There is a lot of untapped potential in any market to write about “why” and not just “what.”  Web template providers work hard to provide feature upon feature to its users, but one thing they lack is why they should use that new feature or, more importantly, how in a relevant real-life example.

Exercising Thought Leadership on your product or service gets you out of the rut of what content you are writing on.  Organizing those topics and subtopics effectivley will help you dominate your niche and before you know it, you have become a leader in your field and you’ll have the search engine rankings to prove it.

A typical company looking to expand business on the web and needing some online marketing advice

Nothing unsual about a company wanting to get some revenue generated through online portals, and optimizing your page to bring in the traffic is key, but be prepared to understand what the customer is looking for once they successfully get to your page.

"STOP!" says a not-so-typical SEO consultant

The bottom line of every business activity is the return on investment (ROI), either in the long term or the short term, so to maximize your SEO efforts make sure your page answers the three essential questions that everyone asks.

Why ... do anything?

Why Do Anything?

This is where you appeal to the potential client’s need for a solution to a problem, or perceived problem they may have.

You need a living will.
You want the thrill that only a speedboat can provide.
You want to save money on groceries.

What this does is also help you articulate the purpose of your business, cause and/or shady spam site. This question answers what you do and the fewer words you do it in, the more powerful it becomes. Anyone who uses vague words dilutes the message.

Why ... with you?

Why With You?

This question is one that is asked by the potential client so as to see why they should do business with you and not the other Google results they received when they found your site. Competition is alive and well in the SERPs!

“I see you emphathize with my need, but why should I do business with you?”

* We provide expert legal advice, in every state, for only $26 a month – no hidden cost, no long-term contracts
* We provide the largest selection of the best speedboats on the East Coast
* We harvest all coupons from all manufacturer’s and even other coupon sites and bring them to you on one page.

The third and final question is critical.

Sir Robin did well with the first 2 questions, but didn't do so well on the third ...

Why ... now?

Why Now?

I asked one business owner once …

“… and then what do you want them to do now?”
“Just read the information.”
“Ok, let’s say they read it, and then they move on, would you consider that a success?”
“Oh no! I want them to call me.”
“Call when? Next week, after they peruse other competitors?”
“Call now.”
“Why would they call now? Why not tomorrow or next quarter?”
“…I need to sweeten the deal, don’t I?”

A “call-to-action” is the lingo phrase that marketers throw to try to get a reaction out of people. It’s this third part that separates the clicks from the click-nots. “Why should I call you, or fill out this form now?”

*Through the end of the month, we’ll waive the $10 setup fee
*First 2000 email responses get a free DVD player, while supplies last
*Sign-up now and you’ll receive the free download of ’10 Tips in Saving on-site at your grocer.

Even an offer of “FREE SHIPPING” isn’t as dramatic as the time element of “FREE SHIPPING between 10/2/08 and 10/05/07.”

Answering these three questions will help your marketing efforts do what they are suppose to do – bring in business. These questions can be applied to brochures, fliers, even business cards, but a website can quickly answer these questions and generate a solid lead for potential business. Vague-er websites with no clear call-to-action risk getting thrown into the gorge of eternal obscurity. (Red, blue… NO! Green! Ahhhhh….)

That blury thing? That's your site.