Site Navigation

The navigation of your website is a simple concept, but very important for the success of any optimization campaign. When you make your website you will need to be concerned about the navigation of your web visitors for many reasons. One of the most important reasons is that controlling your visitors can have a significant effect on your conversions of customers. To be as successful as you want, you will need to ensure that you have a well thought out plan for navigating your customers.

Creating Themes & Silos of Conent

A silo of content refers to a section of pages that all discuss the same topic. The idea here is to provide a sigifigant amount of information about a topic and then link to those pages on your website that also discuss this same topic. If you are an expert in a topic you should convince people of that with your website, and provide a significant amount of information about the topics you know about. If I were considered the foremost expert on SEO could I tell you everything that I know within 1 webpage? NO! An expert should have a lot to say about a topic, so convince the engine you are an expert by telling them what you know.

Mulitple Silos of Content

If you have multiple topics or themes of content for your website, it starts to become more difficult and proper organization is very important. The goal here is to make sure that you only link within a silo and only to and from similar content. You do not want to link from the bottom of one silo to content from the other silo.

I sell shoes and I sell watches. It makes ranking a website more clear to google if you only link your shoes pages to other shoe pages. Then link your watch pages to other watch pages. If you want to link from a shoe page to a watch page, make sure you link to the TOP watch page, or what you would consider the watch entry page for your visitors.

A silo of information is the concept of stacking conent as grain within a silo. Farmers do not mix grains within a silo because it is too difficult to sort them out when they get to the grainery or market. They keep the wheat within 1 silo, and the corn within another silo. So if you are selling wheat today at market, you don't need to do much to get all of the grain loaded onto the truck.

Google and the other search engines like this because they are able to identify all of the similar pages and rank then more easily. So when you build out your webpages try your best to follow these guidelines as they are very important.

Don't most websites categorize like this already?

Yes, you will typically see that on a logically built website like www.bestbuy.com, all of the TVs are within the TV category. And all of the DVDs are listed within a DVD category. There is definitely a logic to this and it also helps with getting good rankings within a website. The king at doing this is Wikipedia, as they have millions of pieces of information only linking to relevant items. This is why they have so successfully climbed to the top of most categories within Google.

But, don't forget to implement this strategy for content related pages. If you have FAQ pages or informational pages the same logic will hold true to get you better rankings than your competitors.