3 Techniques To Build A Silo Structure For Your WordPress Website

WordPress websites are the hottest thing on the Internet, but few know about Silo-ing; an excellent technique which instantly ups your ranking on search engines and improves the organizational structure of your WordPress website. The need for WordPress websites to be effectively organized by linking keywords is viewed as the most sought-after SEO technique. In the simplest of terms, Silo Structuring refers to strengthening the navigability of your WordPress website manifold, so that it reads like a book to your website visitors and is effortlessly indexed by search engine crawlers. Although there are hundreds of guides on the Internet that meticulously explain WordPress Silo Structure Creation, the basic idea is lost to users new to the concept. This article provides a brief overview of all the fundamentals involved in building an effective Silo Structure for your WordPress; but before we jump into complex techniques, let’s understand what Silo-ing essentially means.

What Siloing means?

Siloing in the simplest definition is the ultimate way to organize your WordPress pages and posts by doing away with the hassles of categories and tags. Siloing is a manual process which if done to perfection will result in a highly organized WordPress website.

There are two crucial uses of implementing a Silo Structure for your WordPress website:

SEO Boost: With the Silo technique, you can be confident that you will have outperformed your WordPress SEO strategy. A Silo Structure creates highly interlinked content which considerably reduces the indexing time required for search engines to crawl your website. Thus, your website is SEO-ready with Siloing.
Backlinking: With a strong Silo Structure in place, you don’t have to worry about creating backlinks because your posts are all closely knit together resulting in over 80% backlinking done by the time you share a few posts. Since backlinks make all the difference to obtaining high search rankings, Siloing in WordPress demonstrates its high efficacy.

Breaking down the Silo Structure:

Building a Silo Structure for your WordPress website does not have a rule book that lists a step by step guide. Siloing is a strategy that combines more than one optimization and organization technique, which collectively contribute to building an effective Silo. Although WordPress has categories, tags, and plugins that help in the effective organization of Posts and Menus, Siloing is much more advanced than these simple methods. 3 essential components form a part of the Siloing theory:

Keyword Research: Your Website needs a strong Keyword Research strategy.
Content Hierarchy: Your WordPress content must be categorized in a parent-child hierarchy as shown in the representation above. To do this, you must utilize WordPress Pages to arrange your content using the keywords obtained through keyword research.
WordPress Tools: Use Categories, Tags, Links, Breadcrumbs, and Plugins to bring order within your WordPress Content further.

The Relationship between WordPress and Siloing:

WordPress does not have an ultimate Siloing technique, but WordPress and the Silo Structure have had a very long and strong bond. There are Silo-based WordPress themes as well as Plugins that claim to introduce the Silo Structure into a WordPress site. But there are no special tools out there that will instantly help bring your content into a Silo Structure.

Actionable Steps to create a Silo Structure in WordPress

1. Start with Keyword Research:

Perform Keyword Research by starting out with the free Google Keyword Tools including;

The Google AdWords Keywords Tool
The Google Analytics Organic Report
The Google Analytics SEO Queries Report
Competitor Keyword Ranking.

Here are a few excellent ideas to have a robust Keyword Research Strategy best suited for Siloing:

Obtain Longtail Keywords and Secondary Keywords
For each parent page, get up to 5 Keywords to serve as subtopics.
Ensure that your keywords are relevant to the purpose of your niche, are popular in your niche, and all have high traffic.

2. Get Organizing:

When it comes to organizing the posts and pages to form a Silo Structure, there’s no other way than to get your hands down and dirty. The organization process has the following essential stages:

Silo Content Creation and Organization:

Create WordPress Pages which will serve as your Silo Pages. In these pages, add epic content regarding your niche. Plan your Content around the Keywords procured from Keyword Research. Plan how you will map out all the information in your website content using the keywords into an organized architecture. While creating content, focus on writing more evergreen posts (content that you don’t have to update or rewrite more often). Research well and add relevant information pertaining to your niche in your posts. Incorporate long-tail keywords and secondary keywords to make your content SEO rich.

Silo Pages and Supporting Blog Posts:

Next comes Blogging. Note that Silo Pages and Blog Posts are different but will mutually support each other. When it comes to Blog Posts, you don’t need to churn a mindless one every other day. Your Blog Posts must be used for your Silo Structure and must be centered around the main silo keyword. Under each Silo Page, you will need a minimum of 3 supporting blog posts.

3. The Art of Interlinking:

Interlinking holds the high priority in the Silo Structure. Interlinking makes for a close-knit website structure that’s bound to get maximum attention by search engines. Interlinking in the Silo Structure has basic ground rules that are simple enough and intuitive if you think about the overall effect they have on the site:

All Silo Pages must be linked to the Homepage and this is imperative as the first step in successful interlinking.
Parent Silo Pages must link to their child pages as a rule.
Supportive Posts must link to their parent pages in the same Silo.

Exceptions:

Child Pages may not link to cousin pages but may link to aunt/uncle pages, and always to the Main Silo.
Supportive Posts mustn’t link to Parent Pages in a different Silo.

Limit Link Count:

Each page must have minimal links and most of the links must point to the main Silo landing Pages. The links that do point to the silo pages must have anchor text with your relevant keywords. The reason you need to limit links on each page is so that the most important Silos are interlinked, and your search engine rank is not brought down.

Additional Silo Strategies:

1. Powerful Silo Landing Pages:

Your Silo Landing Pages will make all the difference to the effectiveness of your Silo Structured WordPress website. In order to make powerful landing pages that get you high search rankings on Google and attract traffic, the following tips will prove most useful:

Create Dynamic Content:

The Landing Pages for your Silo Structure must not only contain highly unique content but must regularly receive brand-new dynamic content to keep up the freshness of your site, thus getting it all the attention from Google.

Changing how the Category Page works for your WordPress:

In an un-Siloed WordPress website, a Category Page typically only lists sub-categories which is not very useful to our Silo strategy. To put the Category Page of your WordPress to good use, you will need to make a few changes to the category.php code for your WordPress theme. Here is the list of steps to follow to change category.php:

Add a unique Category Description for your Category Page. Although the Category Description does not allow for HTML Content, with the use of a suitable plugin you can add HTML in the form of Links and Images to further improve the Category Description’s utility.
Interlink Child Silo Pages for the category in the Category Page.
Use the Sticky Posts Feature to add in a few relevant posts in the Category Page.

Here is a visual representation of what your Category Page should look like:

Source: http://scratch99.com/wordpress/wp-seo/siloing/

2. Having an official Home Page:

Your site needs a Home Page which also needs content that will describe and navigate to the top-level Silo Pages. To do this, you can use the ‘Static Home Page’ function in WordPress where you can input content that describes and is relevant to the main silo pages. Don’t forget to interlink the main Silo Pages here.

3. Fixing the Recent Posts Sidebar Widget to be inclusive of Silo Strategy:

The ‘Recent Posts Sidebar Widget’ in WordPress generally lists the most recent posts published on your WordPress website. When this widget is added to a Silo Page, it breaks the uniform Silo structure by interlinking to posts in other Silo Pages. To make this widget list posts from the current Silo page alone, the following code will work best when inserted into your function.php:

// initialise widget

function sjc_silo_widget_init() {

if ( function_exists( ‘register_sidebar_widget’ ) && function_exists( ‘register_widget_control’ ) ) {

register_sidebar_widget( ‘Latest Silo Posts’, ‘sjc_silo_latest_widget’ );

}

add_action( ‘plugins_loaded’, ‘sjc_silo_widget_init’ );

// create widget

function sjc_silo_latest_widget( $args ) {

$sidebar_category = get_the_category();

// if we have a category and we’re on a normal post / page / cpt page call the function

if ( $sidebar_category[0] && ! is_front_page() && is_single() ) {

extract( $args );

sjc_silo_latest_content( $sidebar_category[0], $before_widget, $after_widget );

}

// echo the sidebar – called by widget, can also be called directly

function sjc_silo_latest_content( $this_sidebar_category = null, $before_widget = null, $after_widget = null ) {

global $post;

if ( ! empty( $this_sidebar_category ) ) :

$posts_in_this_category = get_posts( ‘category__in=’ . $this_sidebar_category->cat_ID . ‘&exclude=’ . $post->ID );

if ( count( $posts_in_this_category ) > 0 ) { ?>

<?php echo $before_widget; ?>

<h2 class=”widget-title”>Latest from <?php echo $this_sidebar_category->cat_name; ?></h2>

<?php foreach ( $posts_in_this_category as $sidebar_value ) : ?>

<li><a href=”<?php echo get_permalink( $sidebar_value->ID ); ?>” title=”<?php echo $sidebar_value->post_title; ?>”><?php echo $sidebar_value->post_title; ?></a></li>

<?php endforeach; ?>

</ul>

<?php echo $after_widget; ?>

Notes on Silo Implementation for Unstructured WordPress Site

Once you’ve realized the immense potentiality of a Silo structured WordPress website, you may want to incorporate Silo for your existing website containing existing content. In order to implement Silo for an existing site that’s receiving traffic and ranking for keywords (although poorly), the following tips will come handy:

Find out what Keywords your site ranks for and turn them into sub-niches.
Map your existing blog posts in a way that they sit under a single category rather than a few different categories. Each category must contain at least 3 blog posts so make this change for all the posts on your existing site.
Your Category Names must match your Silo names. Categories that do nothing to improve your Silo Structure must be removed.
Edit your Pages to add keyword content and interlink sub-posts and sub-silos in them.

Silo Structure Facts

Here are a few interesting facts about Siloing in WordPress which will be helpful while you’re at it:

The Right Conditions for Siloing:

So, when do you know its time to Silo your WordPress site? Is Siloing an option or are there indications that tell you it’s time to reorganize your ordinary site into a Silo Structured site? You know Siloing can save the day for you under the following circumstances:

Your Site targets few keywords.
Your Site is chaos in the flesh and everything including posts, pages, categories appear highly disorganized.
You have a specific page that you want to rank highly for keyword(s).
Your site seems averse to Organic Traffic.
You’re starting out on creating a brand-new WordPress website. This is an excellent opportunity to own a high ranking, beautifully SEO-optimized WordPress website by adding Silo implementation to your development strategy from scratch.

The Indispensable Benefits of Siloing:

Siloing is highly recommended for all WordPress sites. The benefits are too great to be ignored.

For one, Siloing is a very safe method with no deceptive strategies to outwit Google. As such, you have nothing to lose and everything to gain from Sioing your WordPress site.
With Siloing, Organization is at its peak and all your content and information is neatly placed and waiting for Google to sniff it out. A Silo Structure has many similarities to an Information Architecture Model which renders it high appeal.
Silo Structure is a friend of SEO and with this structure in place, you can rest assured that your SEO game is on point.

To Sum Up

Websites need regular maintenance and updation, and this fact holds relevance to a Silo Structured WordPress Site as well. If you neglect your site, search rankings will drop before you realize. This is attributed to the fact that keyword rankings and search algorithms change every other day and your site must adapt to these changes as soon as they arrive. With a Silo Structure in place, ongoing maintenance becomes mandatory. Perform Keyword Research every time you obtain new content to add to your site. Add new content to appropriate Silos and weed out everything that attempts to spoil or bring down the strength of your overall Silo Structure.