Missed Opportunity #4: Applying Keyword Research Data to Website Silo Architecture

Missed Opportunity #4:

After making reasonable sense of keyword research data, not knowing about Silo Website Architecture is a massive missed opportunity.

#1 website metrics and keyword data [ 5:22 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

#2 Applying Keyword Research Data to Website Silo Architecture [ 11:08 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Podcast: What to do after you make reasonable sense of website metrics and keyword data

I remember one of the major pains as an SEO/SEM consultant was uncertainty about “what to do next” upon completion of vertical keyword research. Most of the keyword research tools on the market only gave me “ad-hoc” results with no clear direction as to where to put the keywords they suggested. It was a very obtuse process

Not only did they not provide any integrated website silo architecture or business blueprint technology but most didn’t provide recommendations on how to proceed with meta-tag development and Vertical Online Market Research.

Although the specific information was sometimes very good, I was often uncertain about how to take action, even after I was bedazzled and excited  with all sorts of fancy and promising numbers.

Not only was I uncertain how the keyword fit into the framework of my website- it was almost impossible to prioritize how the keyword should drive my marketing efforts and enhance the story associated with the overall theme of my site.

What are the best “top level” themes to used for my business model and website?

What keywords should I target for a  pay per click campaigns? What should I do with the results?

What keywords should I use in my blog?

What keywords should be in the anchor text of inbound links to my website?

How many inbound links should I use to target a specific keyword or group of keywords?

What keywords should I use in a press release?

Not knowing how to prioritize your keywords with real-world actionable data can be a huge waste of time.

None of the keyword research tools on the market helped me to answer the above questions.

What are Your Keyword Priorities?

An advantage to thinking in terms of Website Silo Architecture is that you tend to naturally prioritize the integration of your various keywords into an appropriate hierarchy. This is really great when you intend to “swallow your market whole.” In many ways, thinking in terms of Silo Architecture forces you to think holistically about the ideas, concepts, keywords, themes, products and services in your vertical and niche markets.

Top-down thinking helps you answer questions like: “should a keyword become a ‘top level theme’ that will drive the top-tier development of your website, or is the keyword better placed as the center focus of a basic article?”  Perhaps a specific keyword is merely “low hanging fruit” with a high KEI that needs only brief mention in an article paragraph or a header tag in order to rank on the search engines?

After grasping the basic concepts of Website Silo Architecture, you will know how much attention and what KIND of attention you should I give a keyword. This happens after you have performed a VOMA (vertical online market analysis) with Krakken. The concept of Silos is as easy as that of hierarchy. Once you experience the benefits for yourself, you will seldom design a website any other way.

What is Website Silo Architecture?

Silo Theming: “A website architecture based on a linking structure that segregates various themes into different ‘silos’ so that people and search engines can easily identify the main topics of a website.”

- Sue Bell, Theme Zoom LLC

Silo Website Architecture: A way to organize your website so search engines will recognize your  themes and give you a higher ranking for specific keyword terms associated with those themes, much more so than websites that use random page-to-page linking patterns. As you build specific keyword ranking you can easily rank for a myriad of “broad and general” terms should you so choose.

#1 website metrics and keyword data [ 5:22 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

#2 Applying Keyword Research Data to Website Silo Architecture [ 11:08 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Podcast: Website Silo Architecture Explained with Sue Bell

To learn more about Theme Zoom Krakken Website Blue Print Tool visit Theme Zoom

The world was introduced to the concept of Website Silo Architecture by my former mentor and the “grandfather” of the SEO industry, Bruce Clay. During my early training as an SEO the concept of properly theming and using a website silo architecute was the most difficult concept for Bruce’s students to grasp. Bruce Clay has long been speaking about the effectiveness of using Silo Website Architecture to rank for hundreds of mid-tails within a specific Theme.

Bruce was teaching the concept of Silo Structures prior to 2005 but started having his staff and students write about it online circa 2006. This is about the same time that Theme Zoom published its first online book about Silo Architecture and Keywords. We have come a long way since 2006. The automation of a process that is as “planning intensive” as Website Silo Architecture and “theming” is still pretty revolutionary as you will see. We designed Krakken for this purpose.

Pdf: What the Heck is a Silo Theme Zoom LLC, 2006, (currently offline, New Version Coming Soon)

Site: Back to Basics: Siloing Revisited (Bruce Clay Inc, 2006)

What are the benefits of Website Silo Architecture:

Put simply, a well structured, content rich website is more inclined to become an “authority site” from the point of view of the search engines. The concept of silo themes makes it easier for the non-technical webmaster to avoid “jumbled structure”. A site with a Jumbled Structure is one that has internal links dispersed chaotically throughout the website that are not beneficial  to either visitors or SEO rankings:

(Jumbled Internal Linking Architecture Tends to Confuse Search Engines About Mid-Tail Keywords and Themes)

(And that’s why you need Theme Zoom’s Krakken)

Don’t Lose Your Marbles (or your visitors):

It is important to design a themed website based on a USP-driven market story and use Krakken to create the most profitable Theme Clusters. Otherwise you could lose you marbles trying to “keep straight” about what your website is really about.

Silo architecture is useful for sorting out your themes for both visitor “ease-of-use” as well as “technical search engine ranking.”

For example, if a site is a jumbled architecture as seen above, Google will see your site as a “Jar of Marbles.”

Now this could be fine if your intention is to rank for the broad term “marbles” and you don’t care if your visitors get confused when they arrive on your site and never reach the shopping cart.

But what if you also want to get ranked for “red marbles” and “blue marbles” and “yellow marbles” ? (These are called mid-tail and long tail technical keywords).

The only way for you to get top listings and rankings for these “theme related” long tail keywords is to Silo your “marbles” topics into the modified/qualified marbles terms (i.e. yellow marbles, etc.) This silo structure (partitioning) is done in the LINKING structure of your website.

Although this seems simple, we have noticed that business owners get very confused about how to make this work. It is somewhat technical and can be extremely difficult to implement on a “preexisting” website.

Also, if you do not PLAN for this in advanced- you may as well just forget Swallowing your Market Whole and ranking higher for fewer inbound links for hundreds of keywords with any sort of ease or effortlessness.

Again we created Krakken and the VOMA keywords theme research process to save you from the “brain damage” of this sort of manual planning.

Yes, But What Is A Theme?

Bruce Clay stated in the early years that in order to begin the process of building a Website Silo Architecture, you need to establish keyword centric “themes” for your site.

At Theme Zoom we talk about “themes” in terms of “theme clusters” and synonymic sets.

Definition: Theme

In the context of Website Silo Architecture, “themes” are keywords and content aligned by how people search. For example, people seldom search for the keyword term “products” or “services” within a search query. Instead they generally search for “ford mustang” or “nintendo DX” . It is best to find out how people SEARCH for your products and services and Silo accordingly. Silo’s focus themes in an entire website. For this reason you must identify the landing page for each theme within your research. The silo landing page is really where you want to focus on your conversion.             – Bruce Clay

Video 1: Website Silo Architecture explained on a white board

Russell explains the rather sophisticated concept of “website silo architecture” to intermediate and advanced SEO students

Video 2: (Silos For Dummies) Why we don’t want you to know about Website Silo Architecture

Remember that the article keywords should link to the silo landing page and not to the index page. Diagrams do not do this justice, you must understand and practice this architecture for yourself.

Video 3: Website Silo Architecture Explained

Again, remember that the purpose of Silo Architecture is to rank higher for important keywords using fewer inbound links. If you do not understand this concept just yet, relax. It takes some time (and experience) to let it sink in.

Video 4: Creating Content Silos to Increase Keyword Ranking (Bruce Clay Pt 1)

Video 5: Creating Content Silos to Increase Keyword Ranking (Bruce Clay Pt 2)

Now that we have defined “Missed Opportunity #4″ let me explain how Krakken Solves the problem:

In order to solve the problem of creating a well-planned online vertically researched silo architecture for your website, We have created the Krakken Blue Print Module:

Step 1: Once you have completed your Vertical Online Market Analysis (VOMA) process with the Krakken VOMA module, you may have Krakken create a Blueprint of your major themes.

Simply select the “Blueprint Tab”:

Step 2: Click the “Create Blueprint Button”

Step 3: Name your blueprint

Step 4: Select the country and whether you wish to have an “Outline” Blueprint or a “Full” Blueprint. A full blueprint contains article keyword  suggestions that can be used by your staff or ghostwriters to be inserted into the text of an article on your website. The “skeleton” Blueprint contains only the “main” keywords to be used in a title tag and main meta-data segments of your Silo Landing Page and Article Landing Pages. For the purpose of this demonstration we will use “Full”:

Step 5: Click the Submit Button:

Step 6: A screen appears that allows you to select and add Silos that you have checked during the extremely important VOMA (vertical online market analysis) phase of your project. This is an in depth process that requires some basic training but is discussed in Missed Opportunity 1

You may need to purchase Silos if you have not already.  Please see our Pricing Chart for further details.

Step 7: Expand the VOMA project of interest and select the Silos that you wish Krakken to drill, analyze, and compile. You expand the VOMA area by clicking the small plus icon next to the VOMA project name. You will check the boxes corresponding to the Silos you would like to add to your website:

Step 8: Select the “submit” button to let Krakken know you have finalized your decision:

Step 9: Krakken will then ask you if you would like to add any “articles.” This is an advanced but extremely useful feature. For example, if during the VOMA phase you find a topic that you think may be interesting as an Article but is only remotely related to your USP-driven market story, Krakken will toss the Article under the technically appropriate Silo, if it fits into one. If not, the Article will be sandboxed until there is a Silo in which the article fits. You may also go back to the VOMA project and look at the Article Keyword’s “ancestors” to discover a Silo that is most appropriate to such an article. In this case if you do not yet have any articles to add so simply select the “submit” button:

Step 10: Return to the “blueprints” screen and you will see that “payday loans” has been added as a Blueprint Project:

Step 11: Select the “Drill this Blueprint Button and Krakken will start Drilling, Analyzing and Creating your Silo Website Blueprint for the two VOMA Silo Themes you selected. Go have some coffee, stretch, or go for a walk. This will take a few minutes because of the advanced semantic analysis that is being performed.

At this point, Krakken is finding between 60,000 and 80,000 for your silo theme.  It will then evaluate each of these terms based on LSI, cost and traffic and keep only the best terms as supporting keywords for the silo.

It will pre-select what it believes are the VERY BEST 10 articles.  It goes on to automatically drill out the top 5 of these articles, sifting through another 60,000-80,000 terms per article and selects the most promising supporting keywords for each article.

Note: “full” Blueprints will take longer than “outline” Blueprints because outline blueprints only select the top articles and no supporting terms for either the silo or the articles.:

Step 12: When Krakken is done with the Silo Drills, in a full blueprint, you will see the following screen:

Step 13: If you click on the Theme “payday advance” you will find a massive list of suggested article keywords chosen for their co-occurrence and LSI compatibility with the the theme:

Step 14: Approve the silos and each recommended article when you are happy with the selected supporting keywords for that page in your website.  Your blueprint is created as the silos and articles are approved and you can then export your Website Blueprint:

Step 15: Once approved, the Silos will be added to the main Blueprint:

Step 16: Now you may start approving the Krakken-suggested articles if you wish, or add your own:

Step 17: You may export the Blueprint as a .zip file using the “export blueprint tab”:

When you open the .zip file, you will be presented with the html files pre-created for a perfectly silod website structure, complete with links and keyword lists:

Step 18: Your other option is to seamlessly import the Silo Blueprint into Silo Publisher, Krakken’s Official Website Builder Application. If you are a Monthly Theme Zoom subscriber, you have a single courtesy license for SP, and additional licenses are 15.00 per month (Bulk licenses are available):

Theme Zoom Krakken is an integrated application suite that radically combines Market Analysis, Competitive Analysis, Keyword DNA Creation, Automated Silo Structured Blueprint and Website Development.

Learn more about these and many other advanced keyword and site building processes by signing up for a Krakken membership at Theme Zoom.

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