Wordpress Silo/Theming Structure

[TimScott]

Hey guys,

I was wondering if any one can recommend a good resource to learn about how to properly theme/silo structure a wordpress blog? any and all help is most appreciated. Many thanks in advance!

[TimScott]

Also curious if any one has had any experience with this plugin?

Virtual Silo :: Wordpress Plugin

[kkchoon]

I think Virtual Silo doesn't work any more :

PageRank sculpting

[TimScott]

I've seen plenty of softwares, plugins, and widgets to use, but I want to full understand a silo structure before I buy anything.

[TimScott]

Also, another thing about themeing a website I'm confused about. How do you decide to make a blog post vs. another blog page? I mean if your building specific themes within your blog, and all those themes contain subpages, what do you even write for your blog posts?

[K6x]

Use pages for themes, and then subpages inside each silo. Just link to the subpages from the parent page. Also, if you show a page tree, nofollow it. don't bleed theme.

[TimScott]

Originally Posted by Janejon08

Hi,

Okay, here's the idea right here as we've already talked about putting a silo plugin. Now about the silo structure, let me just give you examples so that you can decide whether you'll do the theming by page or by post:

Let's say your website is about cars...

On the car farm you have:

• Car Accessories
• Engine Parts
• Car Insurance

Think of the different sub-themes of "car" as different grains that would be stored in their own silo. You would never mix Car Accessories with Car Insurance or Engine Parts. You would create a new directory or area of your website that are devoted to each topic or sub-theme of cars.


Doing this will avoid mixing content and confusing the search engine spiders. Of course there is quite a bit more to it than this but this is a very simple and general explanation just to get your mind wrapped around the core concept of what a website silo is.


It should excite you to know that a website with a silo structure will almost always outrank a site without one because of the "theme density" of the silo as opposed to the non-silo site.

Originally Posted by K6x

Use pages for themes, and then subpages inside each silo. Just link to the subpages from the parent page. Also, if you show a page tree, nofollow it. don't bleed theme.

Ok I got it now, So for my main page of my blog, should I be writing the blog posts as a silo theme as well?

[TimScott]

So let's see if I fully understand this.

lets say I wanted to do a theme about cat health

would my silos be cat health problems, cat health insurance, cat health questions, cat health symptoms, etc...

SO basically ae you just starting from a broad keyword, and working your way down into long tail version of that keyword?

[TimScott]

or better example, if I wanted to build a home business theme. Would my silos be

home based business
home business opportunity
home business work
internet home business
etc???

Or would the silos be more like:

small business
work from home
work at home
home jobs
business opportunity
etc???

This is the part I'm confused about.

[Easy Cash]

Originally Posted by TimScott

or better example, if I wanted to build a home business theme. Would my silos be

home based business
home business opportunity
home business work
internet home business
etc???

Or would the silos be more like:

small business
work from home
work at home
home jobs
business opportunity
etc???

This is the part I'm confused about.

Think of each micro-niche as a silo.

If you are using AdSense on your site, then creating seperate definable areas of your site is going to help the AdSense crawler determine what the page is about better and serve more relevant adds.

This means better click values for you.

[TimScott]

Just when I think I'm getting the hang of this, I get lost again. So I'v been trying to read more and more about LSI Silo structure, but I'm having a terrible time trying to find a good research tool besides the Wonder wheel. For example I typed in home business and the topics that came up were:

home business parties
christian home business
data entry home business
home business reviews
home business ideas
starting a home business
small business
work from home

The thing I'm confused about, is what if I want to make work from home into it's own theme. Would I include a work from home silo under the home business theme still or would that be considered duplicate content? And if I can't use work from home under the home business silo,then won't that take away from a LSI structured theme?

[TimScott]

Ok, I got a hold on this now. But I'm curious about one more thing. What if one topic falls under two different themes? FOr example, lets say I was building a social media theme, and a internet marketing theme, and Facebook was a common silo for each theme. Can I use Facebook in both themes, or would that be duplicate content?

[Sylonious]

Originally Posted by TimScott

Ok, I got a hold on this now. But I'm curious about one more thing. What if one topic falls under two different themes? FOr example, lets say I was building a social media theme, and a internet marketing theme, and Facebook was a common silo for each theme. Can I use Facebook in both themes, or would that be duplicate content?

1. You could put it under both themes as long as the content is different.

Under Social Media you could talk about using face book to build relationships.
Under Internet Marketing you could talk about using Facebook as an advertising medium.

Social Media
---Social Media Twitter
---Social Media Facebook

Internet Marketing
---Internet Marketing Google
---Internet Marketing Yahoo
---Internet Marketing Facebook

2. Virtual Silo - While you can still nofollow links you can't save Pagerank. So the linkjuice you would save my nofollowing is lost now.

3. Flexi Pages Widget - A wordpress plugin that allows page siloing. It's nice if you are trying to make a niche website using Wordpress. See An Example Here.

[Daniel McGonagle]

Here's where my education/confusion began with silo theming

BACK TO BASICS: Theming Through Siloing

Silo Theming is a good way to structure a site, but as another poster mentioned, interlinking is just as important.

As a matter of act, interlinking is more important than how you name your categories.

Make your site make sense

What difference is there in a reader's eyes/mind between a work form home category and a work at home category?

NONE!

Site navigation has to make sense to the reader...

So having

Social Media
---Social Media Twitter
---Social Media Facebook

is redundant, redundant

Social Media
---Twitter
---Facebook

Works better

Global navigation fo rintelrinking helps spread your internal link juice around the way you want it do.


Virtual Silo did a good job of that, but as far as PR Sculpting is concerned I wouldn't waste a second thinking about it.

Think more about 1st tier, 2d tier, 3d tier pages or posts and how to connect everything properly

[Daniel McGonagle]

First paragraph from Bruce Clay's article noted above says the following:

The goal of SEO is to improve your keyword ranking. In terms of ranking, sometimes you will find that you are well-ranked for general keyword terms and that you are not well-ranked for specific keyword terms or vice versa. This issue of not being well-ranked for general and/or targeted keywords is in some cases caused by poor page to page linking. When you link indiscriminately from page to page, you dilute the organizational theme of your site, thus making it difficult for your keywords to rank naturally in the search engines.

[GeorgR.]

Honestly,

i too spent some time on that subject not long ago, but your time/efforts might be spent better somewhere else instead of trying to "perfectionise" internal WP structure for shaping internal PR distribution.

Your average SEO plugin already does most of this with Nofollow tags where its needed, and everything BEYOND a reasonable structure (tags, categories) for your site is like wasting time/effort on something where i doubt its worth the time in terms of "real life" SEo benefits.

Focus on content, get your LSI keywords (wonder wheel helps!), make good categories related to your main keyword....get a good theme and/or SEO plugin, make sure your archives are nofollow...thats it.

[Daniel McGonagle]

You are correct sir!

It can be dumbed down to basic interlinking practices and focusing on navigation and categories options that make sense to your site visitors.

Give visitors what they want is giving Google what THEY want,which in turn gives you what you want

Platinum SEO does better job with internal linking and SEO, robots MetaPlugin by yoast, does as good job of internal SEO for WP, too

Originally Posted by GeorgR.

Honestly,

i too spent some time on that subject not long ago, but your time/efforts might be spent better somewhere else instead of trying to "perfectionise" internal WP structure for shaping internal PR distribution.

Your average SEO plugin already does most of this with Nofollow tags where its needed, and everything BEYOND a reasonable structure (tags, categories) for your site is like wasting time/effort on something where i doubt its worth the time in terms of "real life" SEo benefits.

Focus on content, get your LSI keywords (wonder wheel helps!), make good categories related to your main keyword....get a good theme and/or SEO plugin, make sure your archives are nofollow...thats it.

[JAAffiliates]

The new Wordpress Silo Plugin from Dan Raine looks awesome so far. It's early days and I've only been using it for a short time, but so far so good.

[txconx]

Originally Posted by JAAffiliates

The new Wordpress Silo Plugin from Dan Raine looks awesome so far. It's early days and I've only been using it for a short time, but so far so good.

Can you be more specific about your results and why you recommend it?

It's my understanding that this was just released. IMO, that means it's a bit early to be shilling for it unless you have some solid evidence that it does something for your site.

[Steve Crooks]

He is promoting it in his signature, you can draw your own conclusions from that.

Originally Posted by txconx

Can you be more specific about your results and why you recommend it?

It's my understanding that this was just released. IMO, that means it's a bit early to be shilling for it unless you have some solid evidence that it does something for your site.

[yukon]

Originally Posted by Steve Crooks

He is promoting it in his signature, you can draw your own conclusions from that.

Yea, its funny how some members spam their sig., you know what I'm referring to?

[JAAffiliates]

First of all, there is this little thing called Beta Testing you might have heard of. Second, if putting your ventures in your signature box was a spamming crime, there are an awful lot of people doing it and I don't hear anyone jumping on them.

Bottom line, my opinion based on the results I'm seeing so far is that the product looks good, but as I said it is EARLY DAYS. It is a shame that sharing an opinion on a forum, which is after all a place do EXACTLY that, leads to this type of behaviour.

[JAAffiliates]

Originally Posted by txconx

Can you be more specific about your results and why you recommend it?

It's my understanding that this was just released. IMO, that means it's a bit early to be shilling for it unless you have some solid evidence that it does something for your site.

You're absolutely right, it has just been publicly released but beta testing has been going on for a while now and some had it as early as February.

To be more specific about results, I am using it on 3 sites. On 2 I have seen a significant rise in my rankings for (from position 38 to position 4 for my target keywords) on the other a slight rise (12 to 8) but there could be other factors on that one too. Traffic is up about 39% overall.

Why I am recommending it...

The best answer I can give you is that I have spent many tedious and painstaking hours creating silos manually and it's a CHORE!

I am promoting the product but lets be real here, practically everyone on this forum has their own links in their signature (including my critics here!) If I wanted to HIDE the fact that I'm promoting it, I'd have used a different anchor text!

Bottom line, the market will make up it's own mind on the product and my opinion is just that...an informed opinion. However, anyone who has ever manually created silos knows that it is a tiresome job, so on that basis only, $77 is money well spent in my opinion.