Creating a Silo Structure using WordPress

Here's my quick guide for putting together silo structured website using WordPress. If you don't know what a silo structured website is or why it's used then you have some researching to do outside the scope of this post.

1) Get Your Keywords.

Before I build any pages I do my keyword research. If I found a keyword to rank for, lets say ACNE, I put it into Google's keyword tool, set the Match type to Exact, and make sure I check "Only show ideas closely related to my search terms." I want to make sure I get relevant keyword ideas.

2) Organize and Group Your Keywords.

I sort the results by Local Monthly Searches. I select all of the keywords and export them to a CSV file. I open my CSV file and organize the keywords that are closely related. Using [acne] as my keyword, I would take the results and organize them like so:

[acne treatment]
[best acne treatment]
[acne scar treatment]
[acne treatments]
[natural acne treatment]

[acne rosacea]
[acne vulgaris]
[adult acne]
[baby acne]

[what causes acne]

[acne scar cream]
[jojoba oil acne]
[aloe vera acne]

3) Keyword your Keywords.

What I do next after I grouped my keywords, I give them their own keyword that describes the group. A lot of the times the keyword you are grouping by will be in your list of grouped keywords. For example, in the first group of keywords one of them is [acne treatment]. Since my main site is about [acne] I would make this section about Acne Treatment. What you are doing is labeling these groups because they will become a category or section on your website.

Here's how I would label the above groups:

Acne Treatment (I would also use acne treatments as my keyword)

[best acne treatment]
[acne scar treatment]
[natural acne treatment]

Types of Acne

[acne rosacea]
[acne vulgaris]
[adult acne]
[baby acne]

Acne Products

[acne scar cream]
[jojoba oil acne]
[aloe vera acne]

About

[what causes acne]

This step takes the most time because it is the most crucial. This is setting up how we are going to structure our website by grouping our keywords. Don't be afraid to spend careful time planning before you move on to the next step, creating your pages, because it will make things easier for you down the road.

4) Build the Pages.

Once we are confident with are planned out silo structure, we need to take action and start building our pages. What I like to do is build one silo at a time because it allows me to focus on one group a related keywords.

These pages are the top tier of our silo structure. They are going to act as our mini authority on the topic/keyword. I use WordPress Pages and not Posts. Posts will support these Pages as I will discuss in the next step. For now, use WordPress Pages. These Pages are going to act in the same manner as a WordPress category page would act. You know those WP Category pages, the ones where all of your posts under the same category appear on the same page. We want to use a Page here because a Page gives us more flexibility. It allows us to add our keyword SEO content.

Back to our acne example, you would create a Page called Types of Acne. This page will serve as a gateway to different types of acne. Since we don't have any Types of Acne yet, what you will do next is take the different types of acne in our keyword group in step 3 and make subpages of them under Types of Acne. Now on your Types of Acne page you can create links to your subpages and provide a brief description of each.


This Pages URL: www.youracnedomain.com/Types-of-Acne/

<h1>Types of Acne</h1>

Acne sucks and it's no fun to have as a teenager. Not all acne is created equal and people suffer from different types of acne.

<h2>Rosacea</h2> <--- Links to www.youracnedomain.com/Types-of-Acne/rosacea

<p>Rosacea is a chronic condition characterized by facial erythema.</p>

<h2>Vulgaris</h2> <--- Links to www.youracnedomain.com/Types-of-Acne/vulgaris

<p>Acne vulgaris is a common human skin disease characterized by areas of skin with seborrhea.</p>

NOTE: Your WordPress theme may or may not support dynamically adding page listings on a page. There may be some plugins that will you do this.

This will also make for a nice menu because you would have on your home page, Types of Acne, with Rosacea, Vulgaris, Adult, Baby as child menus.

5) Power your Pages with Posts.

I like to use Posts to add authority to my Pages. What I do is find one of my Pages I created and create a Post using the same keywords as the Page. I then link the Post to the Page. It's the same concept as writing articles and submitting them to different article directories. What you are doing is making your Page appear to be the authority. What you end up with are different Pages, each with their own set of Posts to back them up/support their keywords.

The trick with posts is you don't want them pointing to pages on different topics. If you created a Products Page with a listing of particular acne products, you can back up that product with a post that is a review of the product. Now you certainly don't want this Post pointing to a different product, so keep your links in order! A Related Articles plugin works nice with posts because they can link keyword related posts.

If you file your posts under one category such as Blog, then make sure you disallow the category page in your robots.txt file. That's because all of your posts will appear listed in the /category/blog/ page and this goes against keeping your posts under the same silo. I tend to structure my WordPress categories to match the same structure as my Pages. It makes it easier for me and plus I prefer order.

Example #1 - Silo of a website




Example #2



Example #3

This is silo example for a company, but it would work the same way for your website. President is your homepage, Vice President, Marketing would be a Category with two sub-categories, Lead Generation and Marketing Development. The vertical bars under these sub-categories would be your articles.