SEO Silo Structure
Best SEO Silo Structure for your URLs
We hear many people talk about Silo structure when they are doing there on-page SEO, but what does that actually mean, what is best practise for your website?
So Silo structure as far as I’m concerned is your URL or Permalink structure and its important to try and start off on the right foot when it comes to this as your website grows. This is particularly important if you have a large e-commerce website.
What is a silo structure?
Silo structures are probably more important for eCommerce websites or affiliate marketers. They are less so for businesses. Some people start with a flat silo organizational structure, and if the site scales up, you’re probably going to have issues later on.
You will have to create a proper SEO silo structure, do a bunch of redirects, which will impact speed, influence rankings in a negative manner, and a variety of such problems.
On my website, you can see that I have the categories listed above. On my Training Courses page, I have a URL like ‘/training-courses,’ and if I search for ‘SEO Middlesbrough,’ I should have a URL structure pertaining to my training courses.
So, in WordPress, if you go into Settings, Permalinks, you can have a custom structure, post name structure, with dates and everything else. It’s up to you what you want to use, but you probably want to take your silo management structure a little more seriously, especially if your site is going to scale and you’re going to have thousands of pages.
For instance, I’ve done it wrong, just because I rushed out my website at the start, I didn’t even know if I was going to build more than five blog posts, and before I know it, I’m sitting here several years later, asking myself whether I should silo that stuff out or not. In an ideal world, and if I were to do an affiliate project now, I would have the correct structure in place.
Without reinventing the wheel, I think that Bruce Clay does a great job at explaining SEO silos and how to build a website and its architecture. You want to build a website theme with physical silos.
What are physical silos?
The peanut butter example in the screenshot below is a nice description of what physical silos mean. We all know that all of these are subcategories of the ‘creamy’ section, and so does Google. Search engines can easily understand that and see what’s going on on that site.
People often don’t consider this when setting their permalinks. They have numbers, dates, and a variety of things that don’t have any positive impact on their silo structure. This is the ideal way to silo your stuff out, so physical silo-ing is good.
A bad structure would be URLs composed of numbers and illogical information, which doesn’t send out any useful data to the search engines. In general, you should decide on a number of categories before even creating them and start adding content to your website.
Read more: How to make money on Fiverr
What is a virtual silo?
In a virtual silo, each supporting page is linked to the category landing page and the variety of other supporting pages for that theme. The internal linking process is what reinforces the silo theme, in this case.
Try and make sure to avoid doing what I do, where everything I have on my website (and this is not one of my affiliate websites), but everything does have a flat structure — not good. I should have a bunch of keywords under the WordPress keyword cluster, instead.
Read more: What is a technical SEO consultant?
I think setting out a silo structure from the beginning is very important as part of your on-page SEO. We all know that on-page SEO is important, and so are internal linking, keyword clusters, but that silo structure is also paramount from the get-go. So, make sure that you do have a decent one for your website.
For the best silo structure and to learn more about how to avoid mistakes in the future, feel free to get in touch and use our services.
Craig Campbell
I am a Glasgow based SEO expert who has been doing SEO for 22 years.
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