Posted by admin on August 31, 2010 under Coding, SEO, Search Engines, Web Design | 
Siloing is a term that simply refers to how a website organizes its information. Websites that have a ton of information but that lack any structure will spend their days struggling to attain rankings. It can be very frustrating if you know that you have better content than your competitors, but they still manage to outrank you. If your site is a diluted mess, expect a long haul of disappointment until you eventually and in most cases accidentally add enough content to an area to warrant Google ranking you.
If you have a hundred pages that talk about Barbie dolls, you would expect to rank well for those related terms. But if those hundred pages are spread out, scattered, and buried among hundreds of other pages that are not related to Barbie dolls, your pages won’t see the light of day in the rankings compared to even someone who only has 10 pages that are well organized in a Barbie doll area and all neatly tied and linked together.
Take a look at this graphic below that is a representation of what a good silo’ed site would look like;
In this example we have a kids site, which silos down to a toys area and a fashion area separately. Then each of those areas silos down into even more specific areas (girls and boys, etc.). This may seem like an obvious setup, but in companies where the lines may appear to be blurred, you can miss it. For instance if you have a heating and air company, you would be wise to keep your heating services pages away from cooling services pages. Even though it’s very common to see them together, they have very distinctive sets of keywords. Heating has furnaces, heating, etc. and cooling will have air conditioning, freon, cooling, a/c, etc. Keep them separate so that you can build up those areas with the respective keywords. Keeping them together muddies up the relevancy of the pages and dilutes your page strength. Just like in the above example, boys and girls pants could share a page but boys don’t wear capris. Stop diluting your message.
I’ve personally worked on sites that have had this problem and when you get into thousands of pages that are all a convoluted mess, it’s extremely difficult to fix and if there are other forces involved that refuse to organize the site the way it needs to be, it’s very frustrating since rankings are few and far between. If you’re in this position, you can slightly overcome it by doing what’s called Virtual Siloing where even if the content isn’t actually residing in neatly crafted directories, you can still present them and link them in that way. It’s second fiddle to directory siloing where not only is the linking structure that way, but also the site directories.
The last thing to note about silos is the interlinking patterns. For instance, in the example above, avoid linking the “Dress Up” page to the “Boys Toys” areas or even worse, another branch of the silo like the “Kid’s Fashion” branch. Cross link to pages on the same level and in the same branch. But if they’re not really relevant just avoid it since it’s not really necessary (like linking video games to trucks, for instance. Same branch, but not really relevant).
If you do decide to cross link branches, make sure that it’s somehow relevant and that it links to the broadest relevant silo possible. In the example above, if you were to link the “Dress Up” area under “Girl’s Toys” to actual “Girl’s clothes” on your site (a stretch I know), link to the “Girl’s Clothes” area and not to the “Girls pants” or “Girl’s Shirts” area. Go as broad as you can and stay relevant.
Apply this linking strategy externally also. If you find a kid’s clothing site that’s willing to link to you, have them link directly to the Kid’s Fashion branch page and NOT directly to your home page. If it’s a boy’s clothing site, have them link to the Boys Clothes branch and not Kid’s Fashion since that also includes a Girl’s Clothes branch that stems off of it which isn’t relevant.
The larger the website, the messier this gets, but once you get it under control, your rankings will move up the charts quickly and you’ll continue to get more powerful the longer you keep this practice moving forward and stay true to it.
Posted by admin on July 27, 2010 under Coding, SEO, Web Design |
The biggest issue that almost all clients who come to me for SEO help have is their title tags. For those not versed in html coding, there is a tag in your code that says <title> then has some words and closes with </title>. Most businesses are putting their company name in this tag and maybe a “Welcome to my website!“ The text that is in this tag appears at the top of the browser window. The problem with this tag is that most people fill it with worthless text that doesn’t benefit their site. Search ANY keyword you want in Google and you’ll see that the keyword you searched for is in the title tags of everyone on the first page of the search results. And Google even highlights them by bolding the text.
Putting “Welcome to the my Company” in the title tag is costing you greatly. Google looks at the title tag heavily. SEO guru Brad Fallon used the title tag trick early on to rank for “Coolest Guy On The Planet“. No one else had put that in their title tag and the result was that when someone searched Google for “Coolest guy on the planet“, he came up number one because he was the only one nutty enough to actually put that text in his tags. In your case, you are probably competing for something a little more widely used like a dentist office or maybe greeting cards. So let’s look at a couple things with the title tag.
First thing to say about the title tag is that every character is golden. Use your title tag for keywords only. I can’t stress this enough. Don’t use your company name, don’t say “Welcome to..”, etc. It’s a waste. If they’re on your website, they will see your company name and you can use your meta tags to welcome them if you must (that will be discussed in Step 3), so again, only use keywords in your title tags. There are arguments that using your company name promotes branding, but my vote is to ignore that advice.
Here are three programs you can use to find out what the best keywords are to chase for your business.
- http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com
- https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
- or download the Good keyword Tool Here.
Make your list and then you can proceed with wild abandon.
Assuming you’ve done that, let’s pretend that your business is greeting cards, use one of those programs to look to see what people are actually searching for. Pick out the top 20 or so and then analyze each page of your website to see where the best fit is for those keywords.
To start, if the service you provide is local, then you have a good advantage because you can use keywords like “Atlanta Dentist“, or if that’s proving too competitive, then you can use your county name like “Gwinnett County Dentist“. But you’ll use your top 3 or 4 general keywords on your home page title tag. So instead of your title tag saying “Welcome to my website”, it would say something like “Atlanta Dentist | Gwinnett Dentist | Atlanta Dentistry“. This way Google knows that the page is about dentistry.
The other trick is that each of your pages should almost serve as a “home page”. So it’s not just that first main page that people could come to, but any of your pages. So make sure that you do NOT copy the title tag from your home page onto all of your pages. That will have a negative effect and accomplish nothing for you. Make the title tag on your page on orthodontics contain orthodontic keywords. Each page should be different. For pages that are what we refer to as “no money” pages like your terms and conditions, privacy policy, contact page, etc, just use the most general keywords from your list. Be sure to mix them up. The other thing to be careful about is that the page actually is about what you indicate in the title tags. So if you have dentistry keywords in your title tag, make sure that page is about dentistry. Having mention of those specific keywords from the title tag in the actual text of the page is important.
Businesses that aren’t local are a little tougher because your products can be purchased from anywhere by anyone and is not strapped to a locality. You don’t get the benefit of using a location in front of your keyword. Atlanta dentistry is pretty competitive, but nowhere near as competitive as just dentistry by itself. You’ll want your keywords to focus on some of the low hanging fruit. In the greeting cards example, maybe you’d want to focus on “sympathy greeting cards”, “my first birthday greeting cards”, etc. Those are less competitive than the broad “greeting cards” which you can use on your no money pages.
We’ll touch on title tags more heavily later off and on in various lessons because you can’t just use them willy-nilly. Google is more interested in relevance and if you’re keywords don’t match what’s actually on the page, you’ll fail miserably. Yes, content is king no matter how cliche it may be.
In this example we have a kids site, which silos down to a toys area and a fashion area separately. Then each of those areas silos down into even more specific areas (girls and boys, etc.). This may seem like an obvious setup, but in companies where the lines may appear to be blurred, you can miss it. For instance if you have a heating and air company, you would be wise to keep your heating services pages away from cooling services pages. Even though it’s very common to see them together, they have very distinctive sets of keywords. Heating has furnaces, heating, etc. and cooling will have air conditioning, freon, cooling, a/c, etc. Keep them separate so that you can build up those areas with the respective keywords. Keeping them together muddies up the relevancy of the pages and dilutes your page strength. Just like in the above example, boys and girls pants could share a page but boys don’t wear capris. Stop diluting your message.