Some of you might not know what Silo Structure or LSI
(Latent Semantic Indexing) concepts are.
For sure, it’s not conventional knowledge and we are only a few
underground marketers to dissect the way search engines tend to
evolve and rank information.
We are even fewer to deliver our latest findings to our subscribers
and members…

The word silo typically means a storage container.

In a farming example of silos, there might be a silo for cow feed,
one for chicken feed, another for pig feed, and so on. Each silo
has the specific feed for one animal. You wouldn’t mix the chicken
feed with the cow feed, or any other feed for that matter.

In simple terms, when the word silo is used to describe the
structure of a web site, it simply means that content is grouped
into highly relevant groups (silos), and while you can link between
content in one group, you cannot cross link content from different
silos.

Each silo is thought of as separate from all other silos.

OK, so what does that mean.

Well, imagine you have a site about dogs. You might like to have a
sections on the following areas:

* dog training
* dog nutrition
* dog toys
* house-breaking
* grooming

The way you would do this with a silo structure is to use 5
distinct silos. Maybe a folder for each silo. NOTE: These silos
don’t actually have to be put into separate folders (there are
virtual and physical silos), but it is easier to do it this way
when you first start using silos.

With this in mind, I would create a folder structure where my main
site folder would have 5 sub-folders:

dog site (main site folder)
- dog training (sub-folder)
- dog nutrition (sub-folder)
- dog toys (sub-folder)
- house-breaking (sub-folder)
- grooming (sub-folder)

In the main site folder (dog site), I would put my homepage for the
dog website.

I would then create a separate “homepage” for each of the silos.
e.g. a homepage on dog training, and homepage on dog nutrition, and
so on. Each of these homepages would go into the appropriate
sub-folder.

You can think of each silo as being equivalent to a small site.

All content I write for the site will be put into one of the five
silos. For example, a review of “dog chow” would go into the “dog
nutrition” folder, whereas an article on the “best dog brushes” to
use for a particular breed would go into the “grooming folder”.

Each silo will build up into a self-contained “mini-site” within
the larger site. You can even have silos within silos, but let’s
not go there at the moment.

In a logical way, a search engine such as Google for example will
consider such a site as an authority site, because it is well structured,
and it is able to bring a useful experience to the visitor looking
for specific information.

Articles in one silo, cannot link to articles in another silo (well
this isn’t strictly true, but you would want to avoid search
engines following those links if you did include them). So, and
article on house-breaking your dog should not link to an article on
making your dog roll-over.

As the site gets bigger, you can imagine that each of my five silos
will get bigger. In effect, I am building 5 mini-sites on specific
niches within my main dog site.

The dog site homepage would link to each silo main page, and the
content within each silo will also link to the silo homepage, plus
other articles within the silo. I cant go into the specifics of
silo linking here, as it is a huge subject.
Each of the silo homepages have been named using keywords, but you
could call them index.html instead. I have seen both while I have
researched silos, and as yet, I am not sure which is the better
option. If there are any silo gurus reading this, please let me
know your thoughts.

From what you know about site linking, can you see the benefits of
silo structure?

The idea behind silos stems from the idea that links from a
relevant page will count for more than a link from an irrelevant
page (remember how I have said many times that when you get links
from other sites, they should be highly relevant sites? Well,
internal linking is the same).

In general, the more relevant the linking page, the greater the
benefit.

By keeping related content in a separate silo, and only linking
content within a silo, not to other silos, you are ensuring that
all links to and form a page, are to, and from related pages.

The search engines will see all of the highly relevant links to
each page, and see how each mini-site (silo) is tightly themed, and
rank it higher.

Do silo’s work?

Well, in theory, I cant see how they would fail, but I am only
talking theoretically here, as I have not built a hard-core silo
site.

The way I have built sites for the last few years is more of a
virtual silo system. While I haven’t used folders for each silo,
my main pages of a site do resemble a silo main page, and I do
create good content to support each main page.

So, for example, if I had a site on babies, and one of my main
pages was on baby strollers, I would write 10-20 articles reviewing
the various baby strollers available, and linking each one back to
the baby stroller homepage. Sounds like a silo, right?

Where my sites have failed as real silos, is in the cross-linking
of content. e.g. each of my main pages links to all of the other
main pages. This is cross-linking the silos, and something a real
silo wouldn’t have. Also, I do tend to cross-links “silo” content.
e.g. If I had an article on Graco baby strollers, I might link it
to an article on Graco car seats. In a traditional silo site, I
shouldn’t do that, as one article is in the “baby stroller” silo,
and the other is in the “car seats” solo.

To correct your sites so they are structured like a silo, you could
keep that link, but would need to add a rel=nofollow tag to the
link, to prevent the search engines from following the link, and
bleeding the theme. That way, each main page would resemble a
silo, and have related content linking to it.

Having read up on silos for a while now, I am going to try and
build a hard-core silo site, and report back on the success or
failure of that site , so stay tuned for periodic
updates on my silo building experiences.

Using Silos bots will never stop scraping your site! And you will
receive tons of free traffic for this!