SEO Marketing: Home Page

By James Atkinson, LLB

SEO Marketing - Home Page: The home page is the broadest point of your website, covering your “parent theme”: gardening. But each silo has its own 'home' page and these pages are generally know as "Silo Landing Pages".

Let's look a little deeper into the concept of silos.

Silos

Silos, or categories of your site, are used to cover all the major sub-themes or sub-topics that your market breaks down into. In this example, each silo will cover a specific sub-topic of your “gardening” market. For example, you could have a silo on “organic gardening” and one on “vegetable gardening.”

The silo themes are closely related to the parent theme, “gardening,” and provide keyword support for the parent theme. By using related themes, you create strong relevance across the entire theme of gardening and all its sub-themes.

A site needs at least five silos to establish and support its theme. A silo only contains content and keywords that are relevant to that individual silo. That’s how you make the theme 100% clear and relevant to the search engines and avoid theme bleeding.

A silo consists of a silo landing page and at least three to five articles.

The silo landing page is a page of content that establishes the theme of that silo, e.g. “vegetable gardening.” The “vegetable gardening” silo will only contain content about vegetable gardening and its sub-topics.

This ensures that the theme “vegetable gardening” is 100% clear to the search engines and your site will be considered highly relevant for that theme.

A silo should not contain any unrelated content or links – this will only confuses the search engine bot what your themes are and thus you are very unlikely to rank high. The articles, or pages within the silo, provide support for the silo theme. Usually you’ll want to store the pages for each silo in a separate folder of your site to keep things organized.

Gardening Silos Example

The best way to make the search engines consider you highly relevant and rank you high is to create silos that cover the major sub-topics within the gardening market.

For example:

Organic gardening
Container gardening
Gardening products
Landscape gardening
Vegetable gardening
and so on.

I grabbed these silos from the Google Keyword Tool: (https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal).

Silo Articles

You will also want to dig deep into each silo’s theme to cover a network of smaller related themes and keywords. Again, the goal is to go both wide and deep in your market to cover it more comprehensively than your competitors. Each silo needs at least five articles to establish and support the theme of the silo.

The articles are smaller, more specific sub-topics within the silo.

If the silo is “organic gardening,” the articles could be “organic food gardening,” “organic gardening tips,” “organic gardening supplies,” and so on. Usually article pages are stored within their silo’s folder to keep the site well organized.

These folders and files are the same structure as commonly used in programs like MS Word.

Gardening Articles Example

The next step after selecting your silos is to choose article topics.

Articles are content-rich pages that are highly relevant to the theme of their parent silo, and also in the eyes of the search engines will help to support the theme.

If you think of the silos as sub-topics of the larger gardening market, you can think of the articles in a silo as sub-topics of that silo. The article topics help to support the overall silo theme.

Each silo needs a minimum of 3-5 articles to establish its theme for the search engines. In the “organic gardening” silo, the articles could be:

Organic gardening pest control
Organic gardening tips
Organic vegetable gardening
Organic gardening books
Organic gardening supplies
… and so on.

You can see how these article themes are highly relevant to the silo theme “organic gardening.” They create a network of related sub-themes that supports and reinforces the silo theme.

This is how you comprehensively cover the “organic gardening” theme to establish 100% relevance with the search engines. The “organic gardening” silo theme is in turn highly relevant to your overall site theme of “gardening” and helps to strengthen it.

Supporting Keywords

Supporting keywords are highly relevant search terms that are used in the text of a page to support the theme of that page.

The home page, silo landing pages, and article pages all use supporting keywords.

Each page uses supporting keywords that are relevant to its particular theme.

Supporting keywords often have low numbers of searches and low cost per click on AdWords, making them less interesting as silos or articles.

However, they are selected because they are highly relevant to the theme of the page they will be used on. That makes them exactly the kind of expert vocabulary the search engines are looking for as a mark of a good-quality site that deserves to rank high.

Remember, in theme-based SEO, a page doesn’t establish its relevance for its major keyword by repeating that keyword over and over (old-fashioned keyword density). Instead, the page uses a variety of tightly related, natural-sounding expert vocabulary terms that the search engines recognize as being part of the theme.

Supporting keywords are the first things a siloed site will start to rank on. As the search engines recognize the relevance of the web of supporting keywords, the article and silo keywords will also begin to achieve high rankings.

SEO Marketing: Site Structure > Home Page > Silo Linking