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.

When to hire an SEO Consultant
If you’re a small company with sites under 50 pages, you should probably consider hiring an SEO consultant to go over your site, analyze what your problems are, document them, and get you on the right path. The thing you need to be sure to consider is that there certain aspects of your SEO efforts that will require continual work in regards to social networking and link building. For the social networking aspect, you can hire an inexpensive writer who can pump out a few blog posts a week along with some bookmarking efforts. A writer that can perform these tasks are much less expensive than a full time SEO professional. The link building should be done by you to reach out to similar sites that you’d like to connect with and that will bring benefits to your visitors. To fill in the gaps, try a program like LotusJump that will filter out some good “filler” links to juice up your link count legitimately. Do not participate in link farms or link packages. Build your link count naturally or not at all.

When to hire a full time SEO Expert

If you have hundreds or even thousands of pages on your site and your business is in a highly competitive field, you need a full time SEO manager on staff. Fighting against competitors that always seem to be a step head of you is when you need someone on that front line handling the daily tasks of competitive analysis, code changes, keeping all of your various departments from making changes that will choke your efforts, and monitor the progress and results. When you have that many pages, you can’t do it alone and it must be monitored full time. The companies that try to go it alone are the ones that always seem to be struggling with their rankings. But the most important thing you should consider is that you’ll actually need to listen to what the SEO manager suggests. If your SEO person has a proven track record and can’t get your site ranking well, there’s either something very wrong with your site structure or you’re tying their hands and refusing to implement the things that gets the ball rolling. Loosen your grip and listen.

When to outsource SEO services

Almost never.  The primary issue here is that you typically get what you pay for and in most of these cases not anywhere near enough. If you simply must be stubborn or get caught up in a sales pitch, try the service for a month and keep a very watchful eye on what they’re doing including reporting and a list of what they’ve done.  Make sure you are very clear about the keywords you’re chasing and check the rankings before hiring them and the results after they’ve finished.  Don’t let them claim a rankings increase that you already had before they came on board. You’ll typically find that they’ll tell you that you won’t see results for possibly up to 6 months. In some cases, this is actually true and the primary reason why outsourcing is a bad idea.  6 months of hundreds of dollars a month could have been spent on an SEO consultant or good SEO software.  If you can’t afford a full time SEO person on staff, try the consultant route to at least see where things are falling apart. If even a consultant is out of your price range, about the only piece of software that we can suggest would be IBP or Raven’s SEO Tools. These at least offer a variety of tools that you’ll need out of the box to handle your SEO efforts at pretty reasonable costs.

And don’t forget that no matter what option you choose, you should make sure that you’ve reviewed the oft-viewed post SEO Tools You Must Have.

If you were to write a great book (your website) and put it into the library (the internet), you wouldn’t just simply walk in and put it onto the library shelves. Nobody would find it unless it’s in the computer system. The only way that people could find you is if the librarian (the search engine spider) looks at the book to find out what it’s about and then puts it into the system (the index) so that people could find it. Then people could come into the library, put in what they’re looking for, find your book and check it out. And if more people check it out, the librarian makes note of that and will steer people to that book more often since she’s seeing that more people like it. That’s also why it’s important that your book is clear on what it’s about so that it can be properly indexed. In short, you have to make sure that the librarian knows your book exists. Simply building a website that is out on the internet means nothing. Ok. Enough of that analogy.

The way you do that is to submit the website to the search engines either by hand, using a submission service, or letting them find you via a link posted on another site that is already indexed like someone’s blog, link page, etc.. It’s been debated as to which is best and it truth, it really doesn’t matter although having the spiders find it on their own is supposedly a better option. Hogwash. It doesn’t matter how it gets there.

Once a person goes to a search engine, they simply enter the keyword they’re interested in and the engine returns a list of results based on a variety of factors. These factors are things like the age of the website, how many people link to it, the content of the website, what the page actually says, whether the page is even relevant to what they searched for and so much more. In some cases, the search engine will completely ignore the site age, and inbound links (links on other websites that link to yours) and just let it rank well because it thinks it’s very relevant based on how you placed text on the page.

Essentially, you could outrank a site that’s WAY more relevant than yours simply based on how you set up the page, adjusted your title tags, etc. And that’s what I’m primarily going to focus on during this SEO guide. How to get ranked as quickly as possible even though you haven’t set up any link partners, barely have any inbound links, how to structure your site and text, information, body text, etc to get quick results. I’m not going to ignore the important things, but you want quick results and that’s what I plan to give you. This is not about cheating the system. It’s about structuring your website to rank well on the major search engines and giving them what they want. Well most of what they want.

I will preface this by saying that there have been some sites that just can’t be helped at all. Sometimes well established sites are the worst to pull out of the mire. Especially ones with dynamic databases where the content is built on the fly based on what the person wants to see because there’s so much information that you simply could not build physical pages for each possibility. For instance, if you have 50 states and 10 categories, then you would have to create 500 physical pages so that each state has a page for each category. That’s mostly why databases are created is to alleviate that problem and give the user what they want on the fly. If they search for Georgia Photographer, the site goes to the database and pulls the names of the photographers from Georgia and just creates a page dynamically. Those could typically have the worst SEO nightmares sometimes. If that’s you, don’t lose heart. Make sure all of this other stuff is in line first.

SEOMoz (http://www.seomoz.org)
Cost: Varies. The pro level can be acquired for only $79 per year and that’s ridiculously cheap for what you get.
What You Get: Tons of tools like Linkscape, Ranking tools, a couple questions a month answered directly from an SEO professional, updates, monthly online meetings walking you through handling things like social media and other hot topics, free invites to networking sessions all over the world (mostly U.S.) and tons more.

SearchEngineLand (http://searchengineland.com/)
Cost: $149 per year for premium membership (WELL worth it)
What you get: Well most importantly, if you plan to attend an SMX conference in the coming year, you’ll get your money back immediately plus some. By far, the best and most informative SEO conference you will ever, ever go to. Typically takes place in Seattle, New York, London, and other places. The site is extremely user friendly and is updated very frequently meaning multiple times daily. Lots of great news like search engine changes, scams, etc. This one is at the top of my list and one of my favorites.

SearchEngineNews (http://www.searchenginenews.com)
Cost: 6 months for a measly $97 or a year for $144
What you get: A monthly newsletter that talks about current changes that are going on with the search engines. I’d hold off on this one until you get more comfortable with what you’re doing and get everything in place. Once you do, then try this out. They also provide the top 10 directories to submit to, top article places, etc. So try it for 6 months and if it works for you, great.

WebProNews (http://www.webpronews.com/)
Cost: Free
What you get: While there are some paid avenues you can tread down, most of the information supplied is ad-supported and there’s a lot of it. Their emails alone contain a ridiculous amount of up to date SEO information. It’s worth your time and may actually give you too much, which is this side of awesome.

There are a TON of tools and good bit of which are free and some that cost a little bit of money, but they will be invaluable to you. Here are the ones that I use religiously and that you’ll probably want to use also to accomplish great results. You can obviously do it without these specific tools, but these will make your journey so much easier. I’ll break this down into “must haves” and “should haves”. I highly suggest downloading the “must haves” before you even start the SEO journey.

The Absolute MUST HAVES. Don’t even bother unless you have these.

Google Webmaster Tools
(http://www.google.com/webmasters)
Cost: Free
If you’re not using this tool, then you should be shot and hung. All that’s required is that you actually own the site. You verify your ownership by adding a meta tag or uploading a page to the root directory and then you have access to a wealth of information. Everything from broken links, title tag issues, backlinks and more. It’s only shortcoming is lack of competitive analysis, but it’s all here and it’s all FREE.

Google Analytics
(http://www.google.com/analytics/)
Cost: Free
If you don’t know what it is or how to use it, you are beyond help. If you don’t, then just pretend you do and go there. You sign up for free, put a code block into your web pages and then you have a ridiculous amount of data at your disposal. Traffic patterns, what keywords you’re being found on, e-commerce, where they’re leaving from, what keywords they’re finding you with and tons more. There is some setup involved in this, but it’s worth it and an absolute imperative tool for you to use and again, it’s free.

Good Keywords
(http://www.goodkeywords.com)
Cost: Free
This program is limited, but it spits out some amazing keyword suggestions. The program is free, which is even better. You type in a basic keyword you’re interested in and it displays a laundry list of alternate keywords from Yahoo and others.

Google Website Optimizer
(http://www.google.com/websiteoptimizer)
Cost: Free
This is also another tool that you can use to split test pages so that you can try out two different versions of a page to see which one performs better. Free.

Yahoo Site Explorer
(https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/)
Cost: Free
If you want to research a competitors inbound links or even your own, you must use Yahoo’s Site Explorer over Google’s. Google simply does not want to give up everything because it doesn’t want you to know exactly everything it sees, so it only offers you a piece of the puzzle. Yahoo on the other hand will give it all to you. Forget the whole “Google rules” train of thought and leave it at the door. Yahoo’s Site Explorer is one of the most important free tools to have at your disposal. Click the link, bookmark it and plan to use it often.

IBP (Internet Business Promoter)
(http://www.Axandra.com)
Cost: Check site for current cost
I shouldn’t give away this secret, but I use this tool very heavily. It has keyword tools, web optimization tools, competition analysis and a very, very cool reporting feature that spits out 50 page reports in seconds showing analysis of what the top 10 competitors are doing and suggestions about how you can fix your site to be in line with what they’re doing. It’s amazing. One of my favorite tools on the list.

Now these are the Should Haves. These will make your life SO much easier.

SEO Elite
(http://www.seoelite.com/index2.htm)
This is by far the mack daddy of SEO tools to have in your arsenal if you’re expecting to make it up the charts. I have brought companies to the top of Google without using this tool and also with it. And I can tell you that using it makes the process not only easier but hundreds of times quicker. It will shorten your efforts by weeks if not months. It shows you everything from what your competitor is doing, what keywords you should use, how to structure your code, keyword ratios, IP addresses of inbound links, and the entire gamut. It’s amazing and will literally get you to the top of Google very quickly. Get it.

Wordtracker
(http://www.wordtracker.com)
Wordtracker has been around forever and while they do offer a free version of their keyword tool, the paid version offers a wealth of information that will simply blow you away. You’ll have such ridiculous insight into keyword conversions that you might actually get sick by the spinning array of data. It is worth every dime.

SEOBook
(http://www.seobook.com)
SEOBook is run by SEO mastermind Aaron Wall. You will find lots of free tools in the Tools area of their website that you can download and use with the Firefox browser. Dozens of plugins to make finding information about your competitors much easier. There are also free Rank Checkers so that you can track your progress as you go, find out whether or not your link partners are legitimately linking to you, etc. They also have a membership area as well that will give you a lot of extras and access to some very cool stuff.

PPC Web Spy
(http://www.ppcwebspy.com/)
This program is designed to basically spy on your competition while you’re browsing the web. It’s a plug-in for your browser that shows you the keywords that your competitors are focusing on in their Pay Per Click Campaigns which ultimately gives you an advantage to capitalize on words they’re probably missing. It literally will show you all of your competitors ad copy for Google AdWords. Their cost per click, their position, and even how much they’re spending. In reality, this is very covert and is really a crazy amount of information to be able to get. A very dangerous tool. To your competitors.

Ultimate Guide To WordPress Plugins
(http://www.ultimateguidetowordpressplugins.com)
If you plan on starting a blog using WordPress, you need this. It’s the major difference between a blog that gets a few views as opposed to hundreds a day outside of compelling content. Using the right plugins in WordPress is imperative to that effort. This little guide documents the plugins that you must have by all means necessary and others that will tweak the blog beyond anything you could imagine. And it’s cheap.

The “They’re Free, so you might as well get them” tools.

Keyword Pad
(http://www.goodkeywords.com/products/keywordpad/)
A pretty amazing piece of software that is also completely FREE and is literally beaming with greatness. Plug in the keyword you want and you get a treasure trove of long tail keywords that your competitors are most likely missing. Then you can take that list and tweak it out, multiply results and much more. It’s free.

WebTools Now
(http://www.webtoolsnow.com)
Another FREE program that does have a paid component for it, but it offers so much free content out of the gate, that it’s hard to ignore. You can get some pretty amazing information here from keyword research, code alteration, and some very valuable tips. And again, it’s free.

Google Keyword Research Tool
(https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal)
Google Adwords is imperative for anyone to use if you’re just starting online. This tool spits out arbitrary numbers, but it will tell you what keywords are the most competitive, which ones will eat you alive in click through cost, and what words no one is even bidding on. An invaluable FREE tool.

Google Trends
(http://www.google.com/trends)
If you’re curious as to what people are searching for right now and what’s the most popular? Look no further than Google Trends. A glimpse at the most common searches at that given time. You can then use this info to write blogs or articles that are guaranteed to snag traffic.