There’s a new website buzzword that’s making the rounds: silos. Siloing simply means grouping your website themes in a different categories and subcategories, ie silos.
Think of it as sorting out your socks. Socks fall under the category clothing, so they belong in your wardrobe. Not on the floor (that’s an altogether entirely different blog topic) or on the roof or in the garage. All your ‘Clothes’ should be grouped under ‘Wardrobe’. Let’s go a step further though – where in your wardrobe? Not on the hangers. And not among your jeans. Maybe among ‘Underwear drawers’ we would finally put ‘Socks’. Welcome to your first silo!
Your website works the same way as a well-organised wardrobe. Creating theme-based silos throughout a website is a way to clearly communicate the relevant themes of a site to your customers, and to search engines. Ideally to support SEO pages should be about two to three directories deep – going further than that may cause deeper pages to not receive enough links to be considered relevant.
There are two ways to silo a website. Physically is the most straightforward – moving pages and information into relevant theme streams. However, if you have an established website and repeat user base that you don’t want muddle, you can also create virtual silos.
All your pages should link to your homepage – this tells the search engines that these pages are related to and support the topic presented on the landing page. Each page should then also include a link to every other support page in the virtual silo. The easiest way to do this is to include navigation on the page to link the pages together, essentially creating a category-sitemap on the page.
And there you have it! Silos made easy through sock-drawer analogies. Next up, folding fitted sheets.
Also published on Medium.