That’s a great point. I’ve thought the same thing, because the silo would seem more complete by adding the index page to a wordpress blogs. I’m working with WordPress now much more now and I was thinking about the same thing but wasn’t sure the best way to go about it with WordPress.

The more I’ve been working with Genesis from Studiopress — with and without child themes I can see this can be done easily but I’ll have to test it. I’m not sure if you can do this in WordPress across the board but in Genesis you can easily edit the actual url of a post or page. So, in this case you could probably create a page and ensure the path was /category/index.php.

With Genesis and possibly in other Premium themes/CMS’s you can also create custom nav bars and add the links to the index page and replace the nav bar with the default.
It’s something that could be tried and only testing could reveal if it would make much of a difference with the SEO, but it is in line with a the silo structure that would be used with a static site.

Nice domain and blog by the way!

Would seem like a great test to try. I currently have a WordPress site and am looking at restructuring it this way using a index.html

Now in WP, it would make sense to create a Page for each Silo, give it a decent intro with some content and then follow it with a listing of all your related articles. This to me seems like a better way that just using straight categories?

Linking to Booksite.com/poetry.html would be linking to a separate page and not part of a sub directory. If you set up the site with a page instead of a subdirectory then you would link to the page of course. But in the example in the post, their would be a lot of pages in one category so it would make sense to silo them in a sub category.

It appears that the author doesn’t like to reply to readers. I was hoping for a reply shortly after posting almost year ago, and I get a reply from another reader a year later. No wonder I’ve haven’t bothered to make any other comments or visit the blog until now.

Booksite.com/poetry – in the example seems worse than Booksite.com/poetry.html since the first option is technically one level deeper than the second.

Thoughts?

I appreciate the article. I wondering what kind of rules you
follow when linking to main category pages from article pages
with a category and from home page?

If you were linking from Booksite.com/poetry/contemporary.html
to the root category do you recommend linking to the category
page as one poetry/index.html or /poetry/ or is there another
way?

Thanks,

Bryan

Question – how do you go about optimizing the page(s) that reside above the well-defined silos?

For example, let’s say your book site had only Poetry, Business, and Religion books. Siloing each of those makes sense, but then what would you optimize the home page for? “Books” in this case seems to broad.

It’s a convoluted example but I’ve seen it more than once on B2B technology company sites where they sell similarly disparate products and solutions (sometimes resulting from company acquisitions and the resulting merger, etc…).

Thanks again. Would be interested in your take.