SEO Siloing and AdSense
One thing I don't think I've ever talked about explicitly is the concept of siloing. Siloing is something many sites do to organize their pages. The article Theming Through Siloing describes the concept in detail, but basically it means:
- Grouping similarly-themed pages together under a single “landing” or “index” page to create a “silo”
- Link directly between pages in the same silo
- Across silos, link only to the other silo's landing/index page
A natural silo structure often arises when you group content by folder/directory or by subdomain. (About.com, despite its ugliness and use of popups, is perhaps the best example of siloing via subdomains.) Actually, many of these are “semi-silos”, because they'll link directly to pages in other silos, breaking the “link only to the landing page” rule. Silos can be nested, of course, to divide a broad theme into a set of subareas.
The primary purpose of siloing is to improve a site's search engine rankings. For any given theme, the silo's landing page targets a primary keyword for the niche, while the individual pages within the silo target narrower (often long tail) keywords and phrases.
A Siloing Example
Take my No Debt Is Good site. Originally developed as an example of a single-page AdSense site, it would be a perfect site for me to develop using the silo model. (The site currently has more than one page on it already, so it's not a single-page site anymore. That honor now belongs to the site's opposite, Debt Is Great. It's funny, I've had people — banking types — mail me about the debt-free living site to tell me my views were all wrong, but no one's mailed me about the debt accumulation site to tell me that. Hmm.) Here's what I'd do:
- The overall theme of the site is “being debt-free” or “debt-free living”.
- Using a tool like Keyword Elite, come up with a set of silos related to “debt free”. (You don't have to use KE, of course, use any keyword tool you want. Even playing around with Google Suggest will give you some ideas.)
- Ideally, you want to pick the keywords with the highest volume as your silo keywords, which is why a keyword tool like KE is useful for cutting through the drudgery. The initial set of silos I was able to come up with using KE's Project #1 (to get the list of related keywords) followed by Project #2 (to get the search volumes) are:
- credit cards
- debt consolidation
- debt reduction
- debt solutions
- debt free
- debt counseling
Another way to generate this kind of list is to look at the top 2 or 3 sites on Google for “debt free” and use the AdWords keyword tool to get a list of site-related keywords based on those URLs, grouped by theme. The list of silos I get back from this method include:
- debt consolidation
- credit card
- debt reduction
- money makeover
- debt management
- debt help
The lists are very similar. You could probably have come up with most of these ideas on your own, too, but it's always good to check things with a keyword tool to make sure you're covering all the heavy hitters.
- Create a folder for each silo. The name of the folder is based on the silo keyword, of course, which will have important implications on our AdSense ads.
- Create 5 or 6 pages of content for each silo. Each page should directly relate to the silo's primary keyword. Again, you can find a tool like KE or the AdWords keyword tool to find relevant keywords.
- Within each silo, create an index page that links to each of the silo's pages. Each page of content should also link to other pages within the silo. Standard SEO techniques are to be used here, such as varying the anchor text of the links, using proper page titles, headings, etc. Link out to other silos where appropriate, but only to the silo's index page, never to any of the content pages in the other silo.
- Finally, create the top-level index page that links to the index pages of the different silos.
Again, there's nothing radical in any of this, and as I mentioned before many sites naturally organize themselves along similar lines.
AdSense and Siloing
SEO siloing is about search engine rankings. So how does it relate to AdSense? Well, the AdSense patent — you get my detailed analysis of it free by purchasing Uncommon AdSense — describes how the AdSense targeting system selects the ads for a particular page of content. The criteria include the following:
- the URL of the page
- the content of other pages within the same folder/site as the page
- the anchor text of links from the page to other pages
- the anchor text of links to the page from other pages
- the page title
The siloing technique ensures that each page of content focuses all of these factors onto a very specific subtopic of the site's overall theme. Which means that the ads displayed on those pages will themselves be tightly focused on the same subtopic. Better relevance means more clickthroughs, which in turn means more money.
So the next time you start a new content site, or if you want to fix up an old site, use the siloing technique to get both great ad relevancy and great search engine rankings.
If you're a WordPress user, be sure to watch Michael Gray's Make WordPress Search Engine Friendly video, where he shows how placing posts in just one category is an easy way to achieve a siloing effect. You should also refer to my AdSense and SEO for WordPress article and my AdSense and robots.txt series for further tips on creating an optimized WordPress blog.
Sponsored Link: Learn more about the ins and outs of
AdSense by reading Uncommon AdSense, my latest book about AdSense.
Eric Giguere is the author of Uncommon AdSense and the award-nominated (that just means it lost!) blog Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense.
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3 Responses to “SEO Siloing and AdSense”
I found this article interesting, and it fits in with what I’ve discovered (by accident) on my own. I just have one question.
Are you suggesting URLs should be organized as
domain.com/topkeyword/keyword1-keyword2
instead of
domain-com/topkeyword-keyword1-keyword2?
I’ve often wondered if the search engines could tell the difference between the 2. And, what if the top keyword is repeated in the title?
For example, let’s look at a dog blog for instance. Let’s take a dog site for example. Would it be better to have a URL organized as
dogblog.com/poodle/poodle-training-secrets
or
dogblog.com/poodle-training-secrets?
Search engines can definitely tell the difference.
There is a danger in going too deep with categories and such — it takes longer for sites to be crawled deeply. That’s why you need to get quality backlinks that link directly to your deep content and not just the home page or the categories.
Repeating keywords isn’t necessarily bad if it’s done in a logical manner.
Eric
This is interesting, According to several of your articles, and others you mention, it would appear (at least to me) that WP missed out by requiring /category/ or /topic/ or /something/ as a designator for category pages. Otherwise there would be almost a default siloing effect.
What concerns me is the idea of having to create a separate index page for a category along with the default category page that already exists. I have one site with 50+ categories (and more to come), so that seems out of the question.
I found, and did some experimentation with another plugin from UrbanGiraffe.com called Advanced Permalinks. It allows you to “drop” that designator. So instead of blog.com/category/whatever as the category page, it allows you to define blog.com/whatever. Seems like a possible workaround, though it would probably require a separate category.php page to be tailored to work well.
I suppose there’s also a way to accomplish the same effect using .htaccess, but I haven’t worked that out yet.
Thanks for the great articles.