Silo structure

In link building, much attention is paid to backlinks. Those help increase your ranking in the search engines. With a silo structure in your own website, you can also ensure a high ranking. Silo is not difficult to apply, if you do it as the site is being developed. To rank high in Google, this is an important component.

What is silo?

A silo is familiar from farms. There are several large warehouses, called silos, where various products are stored. There is a silo for oats, grass, wheat, etc. Similarly, you should divide the content on your website into logical categories.

Each category is a silo. From each silo, you must then place links to the other silos. This makes the structure of your website easier for search engines to read.(1)

Examples of silo

If you have a website with a web shop that is to be used to sell bicycles, it should be divided into logical categories. For example, create a silo for city bikes, one for touring bikes, one for road bikes, and a silo for mountain bikes.

From each category you can link to the other silos. So in SEO terms, you make sure that each silo reinforces the others. Search engines can easily index your site, especially if you use an XML sitemap.(2)

The importance of silo

As already indicated, a silo structure layout provides clarity to your site. Not only will search engines be able to make sense of your site more easily, but you’ll find that visitors can navigate the site much more easily as well. The effect of a silo structure becomes even greater if you post quality content and meet all the requirements that come with SEO optimization.

Read more on this topic

• All about H1 tags and the impact on SEO
• All about H2 tags and the impact on SEO
• Setting up a website structure for SEO
• SEO landing page setup for Google
• HTML and SEO

The impact of silo

Silo can have quite an impact, especially in the first few months after launching your site. Try to get good quality content on the site as soon as possible, so that the effectiveness of the keywords in the silo structure can be done justice. You will see that you will quickly rise in ranking against competing websites.

Especially for local SEO, a good silo structure can be used. This can improve online findability for local results.

My advice

When developing a new Web site, take the time to divide the information into logical categories that are siloed. Remember to have each silo reference every other silo, preferably multiple times. Making a silo is relatively easy and the effect is more than worth it.