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SEO Silos: How to Rank for More Keywords Without Building Links [5 Ways]
– In this video,
(upbeat music) I'm gonna be teaching you everything there is to
know about SEO silos and website architecture. First, what is an SEO silo? This concept refers to
a standardized structure of your website where certain
pages will link to each other based on a thoughtful,
standardized pattern, typically based on relevance. If that sounds confusing, don't worry, I'm gonna be breaking
this down very, very soon. But first let's talk about the benefits of a planned site architecture. The first benefit is topical relevance. When you have a page about protein powder and you have other pages on your website about protein powder
linking to it, guess what? Google thinks are a little
bit more about protein powder and when you make Google's life easier, they rank you higher.
Second, you get a lot more mileage out of your link building. Your homepage. for example, typically gets more back links externally than any other page on your website. A lot of people call this
back link value, link juice. With a well-planned SEO silo structure, you can make sure all of that
link juice is spread around to all the pages of your website, thus increasing their rankings as well. Third, you can rank much easier for long tail keywords. Because you successfully delivered that link juice to
all the pages on your site, don't be surprised as some
of those pages start ranking without any external link building at all. People will link to information articles like how to clean a fishing
pole much more easily and leniently than they
would a commercial article like by fishing poles.
(bell rings) You can focus your external
link building efforts on getting these ease to land links on the informational pages
while still powering up your commercial pages
through internal linking.
Now, before we jump over and start talking about the various architectures and configurations of SEO silos, now's probably a good
time for me to ask you to hit that like button,
smash, it, mash it, whatever you gotta do. That lets me know that you
like the content you saw and you wanna see more of
it, so help a brother out. The key to good SEO siloing starts with foundational keyword research. You wanna be able to take your main foundational keyword topics,
break them down into subtopics, break those down into subtopics and then structure each page of your site based on this categorization. Let's explain this with an example, so if we take this example of a website called DietMasters.com,
let's say its main keyword, it would ever wanna rank is best diets, let's see how we can break
this down with an example.
If we take a little bit of time and do a little bit of
research on Google itself or perhaps using our favorite
keyword research tool, we can find that best
diets could be broken down into the various diet types. So we can have the keto diet,
for example, ketogenic diet, we'd have the paleo diet
and then the vegan diet. And then each of these topics
can be broken down themselves, let's see how that looks. So for example, we can take the keto diet, just doing a little bit of research, we can find that subtopics
underneath the keto diet could be keto diet meal plan, keto diet supplements, keto diet apps. We can do the same thing
for the paleo diet.
So with paleo diet, we have
paleo diet weight loss, paleo diet meal plan and
then the paleo caveman diet. And then typically for vegan, we can talk about vegan protein sources, vegan meal plan, and then raw vegan. Guess what we're gonna do after this? We're gonna break it down even further. Now I'm not illustrating
the whole tree here, that would make this slide way too messy, but we can see that
the keto diet meal plan is broken down into breakfast, into keto diet meal plan for men and keto diet meal plan for women. And as you notice here, typically as you go higher in this chain, these are more commercial and more difficult keywords to rank for. And typically as you
go lower in the chain, these are your more informational
and typically easier, long tail keywords to rank for. Now, let's get into the meat of this video and talk about the real
heart of SEO siloing, which is how you interlink
these pages together.
This is what truly
defines the architectures, the various configurations of siloing. So let's get into it, internal linking. And when I'm talking
about internal linking, I'm talking completely
about contextual links here. Contextual links are
also called body links. These are links that you have
in the middle of your article, in your paragraphs, in your sentences. I'm not referring to sidebar linking, I'm not referring to nav
bar linking, footer linking. The links that really matter when it comes to siloing
are your contextual links. Here's configuration number one, I call this the top-down recycle SEO silo, in this kind of configuration, again, we have the same architecture as before, we have all the keywords mapped out, but here's how we're
gonna do the interlinking. We have our top page best diets, that's gonna link down
to the keto diet page, the paleo diet and the vegan diet page.
Remember these are contextual links found in the body of the article. And then so forth, just using
the example for the keto diet, that would break down linking
to the meal plan page, the supplement page and then the app page. And then guess what? The meal plan page will link down to breakfast, men and women. And then what happens
is it links back up here from the bottom of the silo
all the way up to the top page. Now let's take a look here
and see what would happen if we got an external link
to any one of these pages, starting with the best diets
page, so let's move up here. Let's say we get an external link, meaning a link from another
website to this best diets page. Now that link juice is gonna flow down to all three of these top guys. It's gonna flow down to this
meal plan supplemented app, down here to the breakfast
page for men, women, it's easy to see, you just
follow the lines here.
And then it's gonna recycle
back up to the top here. So as you can see here, there's pretty good flow of link juice. Anytime you get a link
anywhere on the site, it's gonna flow around
to the various pages, then every single page
on the entire website is gonna get a little piece of that link juice, that's great. What is the reasons that we do this flow back up to the top here? Because what this is doing is called completing the loop here. If we've, for example, had a
link that was going to here, that was going to here, then
kind of dead ended here, well guess what? There'd be no benefit after this point, if we got a link directly
externally to this breakfast page and that didn't link out to anything else, that's a dead end for that
link juice and it goes nowhere.
How does it look in terms
of topical relevance? So the more links that you
have from similar content, the more topical relevance you would get from other pages on your website, then Google thinks you're
more relevant to that topic. So for example, we look
at the keto diet page, it only has one link
from the best diets page. If we look at the meal plan page, it only has one link
from this keto diet page. So the topical relevance
in this configuration, isn't great at all. Another reason I'm not a big
fan of this configuration is typically, if you're
looking to getting someone closer to the sale, you wanna link the other
direction completely.
So someone comes into a long tail keyword like what's a meal plan
for the keto diet for men? So he lands on this page, we wanna be able to link him up to stuff that's more general and
more commercial and intent. We wanna be able to link here and then give him to the keto diet page or maybe the app page
or someone like that, where you can spend money like the supplement page, for example. This one links in reverse
and it gets people further away from commercial keywords, so it makes me not so
much a fan of this one. Let's take a look at the next one. Configuration number two
is called the reverse silo. This is one of the most popular silos. And let me just describe the
linking in this configuration. First, we had the best diets page and this has a two way
link to the keto diet page, the paleo diet page and
the vegan diet page. So not only does the best diets page link to the keto diet, but the
keto diet links back to it.
And then the pattern follows as such, the keto diet goes down the meal plan, supplement, app, meal plan
breakfast for men, for women. So what happens here when
we get an external link, let's say just for fun, we got an external link
to the supplements page. So the link juice is gonna
flow up to the keto diet page, which is gonna flow the best diets meal plan, supplement and app. So we have full direction of
where this link juice could go, it can go in the up direction, It can go the down direction. It also handles this consideration where we wanna be able to link in the top direction more often because that's typically more commercial on where we can make more money.
It also really has a lot
better topical relevance, as you see, the keto diet page is getting a lot more links than before. Whereas it only had a link from
the best diets page before, it's now getting a link
from the meal plan page, supplements page and app page. So overall, I really
liked this configuration. Another reason I'm a fan
of this configuration is because you can see
here that certain pages are only linking to each other if they're very tight in relevance. Obviously, meal plans have a lot to do with breakfast meal
plans for men and women and the keto diet. So they're very close and very adjacent to what they link to. And that's good for beginner websites, when you really, really wanna be tight on what you link to in order
to establish topical relevance. For beginner website, you don't wanna have keto diet meal plan linking
to a paleo diet page, that's gonna throw off
Google and confuse them.
So with this reverse silo,
you're linking very closely, it kind of protects you from risk. Configuration number three
is called the serial silo, and I'm not talking about
captain crunch here, I'm talking about serial as
in the opposite of parallel. And here's how it works here. So we have best diets, it's gonna link down to
the subtopic beneath it. So it's gonna link to the keto diet page. Keto diet will link over to paleo diet, will link to vegan diet and then back up to the best diet page. And then we do that again down
here, and again down here.
What happens when we get a link here? Okay, so let's just pick one at random. We got a link to this breakfast page. So link juice will flow
to, for men, for women, it'll go up to meal plan, meal plan will make it to
supplements, app gets a keto diet. So overall the link juice is gonna flow over the entire website, that's great, but man, I just have to tell
you, I hate this configuration, I really don't see much use for it at all.
So just take a look here. So the best diets page is
linking to the keto diet page, the app page is linking
to the keto diet page, that's great, it's got two
topical relevance links, that's not very much
when it could be getting a lot more and a lot more relevance. Plus any page in the middle here, so keto diet or paleo diet page. The paleo diet page is only getting one topical relevance link and it's not even really that relevant. Keto diet linking over to paleo diet, I mean, they're literally
different types of diets, why would you wanna link these together? The only reason that I
see people doing this and still, I think it's a
mistake despite that is, let's imagine your keto diet page had 70 different subtopics, so do you really want 70
different external links leaving this page and going to the various
pages underneath it? You might have to pick and choose, I still don't think
doing a serial approach and only linking to one of them and then having them link to each other is the way to go about it.
So please avoid this one, I'm not into it. Let's look at configuration number four. This one, I think I hate even worse, this one's called the yellow silo, this isn't an official
name, I just made it up. Or you just have every single page links to every single
page on your website. And obviously, I don't
even need to map this out, if I get a link anywhere, that link's just gonna flow
around the entire darn thing.
The problem with this one is you get a lot of non topical relevance. So I'm gonna have vegan diet stuff linking to keto diet meal plans for women, it just doesn't make any sense at all. On top of that is when every page links to every other page on your website, meaning that there's absolutely uniform and equilibrium spread of link juice, that means that no single page has a particular advantage to
rank over any other of them and that's silly because certain pages have more commercial
intent for yourselves, can make you more money, certain pages have more search volume, you want to have other pages
get advantages over each other. Configuration number five is
what I call the priority silo. And this is for advanced SEO that really wanna take
control and get the best out of their internal
linking of the siloing. So I've identified two pages
here that I've marked in gold. One is keto diet and that typically has
a lot of search volume, it's top of the category, it's gonna have a lot
of search volume here, obviously it's gonna
bring a lot of traffic.
And then another page here would be like keto diet supplements, and this one probably has
a lot of affiliate links that I could put on there, I could link out to my
favorite keto supplements and get some money made for this website. So how this linking configuration works for the priority silo, you
start with the reverse silo, so that's the basic foundation here. But then because I've
identified these priority pages, I'm gonna find other
relevant pages on my website and interlink manually to
these without any structure, I'm just gonna go up the chain, sideways on the chain, whatever, I'm gonna do the same
for the supplements page.
Now because we've already
looked at the reverse silo and the basis of this configuration is already the reverse silo, you already know that link juice is gonna flow around really
nicely in this configuration, but where this one particularly
excels is topical relevant. See, we've found our priority pages and they have more internal
links than other pages because they're more
important for us to rank them and they have exceedingly
amounts of topical relevance, 'cause it's not just two
links link into them, it's not just one link, there's multiple, sometimes five six, in
a real configuration with tons of pages on the website, you could get up to 20 and 30. Now, if you look at some of the more successful websites on the internet, if you look at the Wirecutter,
you look at Gear Hungry, they internally link just like this. They link in-access so to speak and not to the point where it's too much, but they prioritize and
they identify those pages, they link more to them. So the question you
probably have right now is which one is the best? Well, let's take a look.
For beginners, I'm gonna recommend the good old reverse silo. The reasons for this are, first off, it's super easy to follow, you just simply identify your structure, you map everything out, you
map out your sub-topics, your sub subtopics, your long tails, and then you just link down and you link up, and you're done. Also, as we've discussed,
it's great link juice flow, no pages left out, no pages left orphaned, everything is gonna get good link juice and there's decent topical relevance here. Most pages are getting quite a few links, especially the important ones.
For advanced SEOs, I'm gonna recommend the good old priority silo. Now this is excellent
for topical relevance, it's excellent for link juice flow. The only downside here is
there's more management involved. Now let's jump over
into some FAQ, some Q&A. So question number one. What is the difference between
a hard silo and a soft silo? Have you ever heard these words? First off, soft silos is everything we've been talking about so far, these are built through interlinking. So it's simply one page
internally linking to another page is establishing what's
called the soft silo and the configuration and the
total architecture of this is defining the overall soft silo itself. Hard silos are built through
directory structures. So an example of this might be DietMasters.com/paleo/meal-plan. Now interlinking is also necessary when you're doing hard siloing, just because you make
the directory structure doesn't mean you're gonna
have link juice flow, doesn't mean you're
establishing topical relevance.
It's just an icing on the cake type thing. This is helpful, especially for users, if a user wants to know,
where am I on this website? Am I in the paleo section? Am I in the keto section? What's going on? It's helpful for users,
but it's not required here. It's also kind of helpful in local SEO when you're breaking things down to state, to County, to city level,
all that kind of stuff, but again, not required,
focus on soft silos. Now the next question
is about anchor text. What kind of anchor texts should be used when I'm sending links
to these internal pages, let's say for this keto diet page, what kind of anchor text should I send? I'm sending five links to this page, how should I diversify the
anchor texts, if at all? Now I do a lot of SEO testing and we've tested various configurations. Let's try a hundred percent of the links being target anchor
text, we'll try 80%, 60%, and here's the results I found.
The best result we found was when we add a hundred percent varied
target anchor texts going to any one of these pages. And what I mean by varied is, instead of keto diet,
keto diet, keto diet, I might do information
about the keto diet, keto dieting, keto diet, et
cetera, just always varied up. So that got the best result, that said, one of my
recommendations is maybe you go 80% varied target anchor texts and 20% miscellaneous,
like click here, read more.
That adds in a little bit
of a buffer for error. Typically what I've seen is, it's hard to over-optimize
for internal anchors, but if you do spam keto
diet over and over again, you could get into a situation
where you're over optimized even internally, and I have
penalized myself like this. So I kind of recommend,
especially if you're outsourcing, to add in some kind of buffer for error. Frequently asked question number three is, how relevant do pages need
to be to link to them? Another very good question. For new sites, I recommend being very, very tight on your relevance. So paleo stuff should only
link to paleo stuff, et cetera. I've had sites that are just starting out and I'm trying to cross
link between categories and just nothing worked out. Once I tightened things
up, then Google started really understanding the topical relevance and started to reward my site more. For established authority sites, you can relax, you can relax a lot. Check out the Wirecutter, just Google any one of
their pages, for example, best coffee grinder, best coffee maker or something like that,
is not all coffee pages that are linking to these pages.
Once you're nice and established and you're an authority,
you can really be flexible on how much you're linking to these pages and how relevant they are, and you can just focus on
shuffling around that link juice and making sure that's
distributed to your site. Next frequently asked question is, what is the most important
page to link from? That is your homepage. Consider that your
homepage is the best page on the internet to get a link from. It's always super relevant to your website and it's got a lot of link juice because a lot of external
links are going into it. So when you're linking out from it, make sure you're being stingy about it, only links to your most important pages because you can't link to every
single page on your website from the homepage linked to
your most important ones. And our last frequently asked question, are there any pitfalls to think about? I got two for you.
The first is sending
exact match anchors over and over to same page is something that could over-optimize you. I have a war story,
affiliate website that I had and just before the Christmas holidays, when sales just go through the roof, I wrote a bunch of content, I wanted to rank my main pillar page. I interlinked them all
with the exact match anchor and just tanked my rankings,
absolutely tank them. Figured out what the problem was and then varied up the anchor texts and finally I bounced
back, but it was too late, it was after the Christmas holiday. So this issue is burned into my psyche, please don't make the
same mistake that I have.
The second one is not closing the loop. And you might remember this from before. Remember when we're linking
down from the top level pages to the subtopic and these guys,
never have a page like this, that doesn't link back
up to something else. Whenever you have a dead end like this, that link juice just go stale. It doesn't go anywhere else, no topical relevance is passed on, no link juice is passed on. That's not a good thing, so don't do that. And here's just some quick
parting boards with you. Despite all these configurations
and architectures, you have three main goals
with your interlinking. Link to pages that are relevant, link to pages you wanna rank and link even more to pages
that you really wanna rank. At the very least, just
stick to these three concepts and you'll be good to go. If you like what you saw,
remember to subscribe and mash a like button.
Happy ranking..
