Video Transcript

Hey, I’m Chad with Arcane Marketing. I just wanted to make a little video over “website siloing” or “architecture siloing”. And basically what that is, is organizing the content and topic in the website in a way that makes or helps search engines like Google or Bing understand your content or your topics a little bit better. That eventually will help your website rank better for keywords you are optimizing for.

Website Siloing is not something I developed or any agency in particular did, it’s actually the brainchild of a gentleman named Bruce Clay. He developed this concept quite a few years ago. And if you want to get deeper into this, and I’ll explain it a little bit, but if you want to get deeper into this, go to BruceClay.com/seo/silo.htm. It explains in vastly better detail and more thoroughly than what we’re going to go over in this. The idea here is to just give you a little run down and help you understand what you can do to help your website or to help you organize your website in a way that is more understandable to search engines and the users of the website.

So think of siloing architecture or a website kind of like a jar. And inside that jar are a bunch of marbles, and each marble might be a product or might be a topic or something that you’re writing about. You can think of the jar as your website. You have your product page here, another marble here that’s a specific topic and maybe you have something over here that is related. But then, for instance, if you are selling shoelaces, this could be white shoelaces, and then you have blue shoelaces here, and you have another page here and here. And then maybe you have flat shoelaces versus round or square shoelaces or leather shoelaces, and those are here and here. You can see if you were to reach your hand in that jar you would kind of understand, or try to understand what’s going on. With them all jumbled up like that, it can be hard to figure out what the idea here is, or even if you put your hand in and pull one out, you might not get exactly what you’re looking at.

You kind of have to think of how a search engine would look at a website that’s all jumbled up or pages and URLs are just mixed together and categories are mixed together. It can be hard for a search engine and the user of the website what this is all about. Yeah, they are all about shoelaces or they are all about plumbing, or they are all about something else, but it’s going to be hard for a search engine to serve up one of these pages without knowing why it should be if somebody is searching for it. So, to help combat that, what one person could do or a company could do, is to create three different websites and say, alright this website here is about leather shoelaces and flat shoelaces and this. And then, maybe another website they create is called blueshoelaces.com, and they have all of their different blue shoelaces in there and that’s great. And then maybe the other website is their white shoelaces, and they have that there. So that’s great because it’d be easy for a search engine to serve up one of these websites and say “hey, you’re looking for red shoelaces, or white shoe laces or whatever, this is the website to go to.”

But the problem here is, you’ve got multiple websites you’re dealing with. So now you’ve got, you know, updates that you have to keep up on all of them, you’ve got different security that you have to keep up on and all that other stuff. Matching three or more or multiple websites can get time consuming. And it’s expensive for hosting and domain and registration. So, the idea of website siloing is that we would take this stuff, all these different topics or products and organize them into one website so that it’s easier for the user and the search engine to know what pages or what topics to serve up in your one website to a user. And that helps your overall website, domain authorities, any link pointing to them. It helps organize things better, it helps things show up better for a keyword search.

Taking all of this, a properly siloed website would look something like this, where you’ve got the website, but you’ve got a section here for all the white and red shoelaces right here. And then you have another categorized area in your website for the blue shoelaces, right. And the idea here is you’re organizing everything in one place that is much easier for people or users to navigate and find stuff. And it makes it much easier for search engines to understand how these things all relate to one another. I mean, they’re all shoelaces, but they’re all in the same website and organized neatly. And the reason why we use the term “siloing,” is if you think of a grain silo, you’ve seen these all out in the fields. You have a large structure that’s rounded at the top and comes down and you have all of your siloing in there and all your grains or whatever.

It’s a silo.

The idea is, at the very top would be your homepage, right. And that’d be the very tip top of your silo. And as the pages and the structure of your website come out, they start to break out and come down into these columns or “topics”. So maybe here you have services, and maybe here you have products and maybe here you have a blog. And so they start to break out a bit more. And in your services, you might have service one, and service two, and service three and service four. But maybe in your products you have different products like A, B and C, product A, B, and C, right. And each one of those products has their own categorization to them. So that makes it easy to understand, hey here’s these shoelaces right here, the white ones are right here. And maybe there are green shoelaces in this one here. And then of course, your blue ones over here.

And so the idea here is, when search engines crawl your website, it doesn’t matter what page they hit, they can easily find their way through and understand where these products and these services or this information is categorized. And so, this is just a really crude way of me to explain how this works, but the idea is organization. When you organize your website and your products or your categories or your topics in a way that makes it easy to find stuff, it makes it easier for search engines to understand where these things live and why those search engines should offer these specific pages when people search for them. And so, i don’t want to get too much deeper into that. The idea here, really, is to take a good look at your website and analyze how it is set up, and say how can we categorize this in a way that makes sense to the end user and of course make sense to the search engines.

So, go visit BruceClay.com/seo/silo.htm. I mean, it is an extremely well thought out and detailed article and it’ll get deeper into this and help you understand much better about what website siloing is. If you want to know more about siloing, and if you want to higher a company or have someone help you organize your website better, don’t hesitate to call us at (208) 938-5988 or visit arcanemarketing.com, we would be happy to give you a consultation and see what we can do for you. Hey, thanks for watching.