Potential Dangers of Using A Blog As Your Website Silo Architecture Money Site

One of our Theme Zoom Revolution members wrote:

I have a website I built with WordPress about 8 months ago and I have some decent rankings but have stagnated with improvements. The market is either niche or micro niche and the terms I am targeting are very low competition.

Thanks to lots of coffee and some wonderful training videos I realize that every time I add a new article I am diluting the theme of my website.

Even though this is not a massive market I have picked this to go thru the Domain Web Studio videos and ultimately take this into Krakken to theme my site and build my confidence in a less competitive market.

My question is how to move forward with a site that already has some content on it (30+ articles) and theme it accordingly?

I am not a super techie and I a wondering if you recommend the WordPress plugin “Wp Silo?”

I do remember in the videos a reference to “bolting on” a silo to a previously built website. If you could follow up with how move forward with a website like this I would be very grateful.

Thanks!

This is a great question that I think might apply to many, so I thought I’d post my answer:

If a theme is a niche, it’s hard to do too much damage with ‘theme bleeding’, because of the topics are probably related.

However, the more you can silo your themes the easier you will rank for them.

Blogs have got a lot of potential issues.

1) They can be hacked and be used unscrupulously to bleed page rank. (They
can also be hacked and simply trashed or redirect all links and or pages to
another site – often times hacks are time delayed so that restoring to a
point before there seemed to be an issue is futile).

2) Content typically “expires” and is discounted by the search engines
after a while (sometimes monthly, sometimes annually).  Typically this is because it’s the home page on a blog that has page rank, and not the individual article pages.  So as a post falls off the home page, it looses the link from the only page on the site that has page rank and falls off the search engine rankings.

There are ways to avoid this, but you have to do things like promoting your category pages so that they get inbound links and page rank, as well as promoting the article pages individually.

3) They can be set up (unintentionally) in such a way that search engines
will register the site as containing duplicate content.

One way this happens is to set your blog up so that the category is part of the url string.  Then, when you assign a post to more than one category, that will cause the same article to have two different url strings (one for each category), and that looks like duplicate content to the search engines.

Those are the things just right off the top of my head.

There are no silo structured plug-ins for blogs at the moment that I recommend. I’m working closely with a couple of colleagues to try to put together a word press “theme” that will silo properly and solve some of the issues I mentioned above.  (There is no solution for the hacking issue, unfortunately)

However, I have to say that I prefer websites over blogs – good old fashioned html websites (as opposed to joomla, drupal and other CMS platforms). This is especially for a money site.  If you depend on the income generated by a site, you want to make it as stable as possible.

I use blogs to promote the websites. They are great for that- a new blog post can get indexed super fast.  Thanks to RSS, blogs have a huge reach – getting you lots of traffic and deep market penetration rather quickly.

Then direct that traffic to your website and make a sale. The call to action on the blog can go straight to the sales or sign up page on your website, so you loose as little of the momentum generated as possible. Don’t make them guess and search around the website trying to figure out where to buy what you have already sold them.

So my suggestion would be to rewrite the most popular content on your blog and use that rewritten content to create a silo structured website.

I know that’s not the answer you were hoping for, but I hope it helps.

For more information about this topic and to learn how to use technologies and principles to succeed in business, please visit Theme Zoom.

–Sue Bell (The Architect)

About Sue
Sue Bell is the CEO, founder and mastermind behind Theme Zoom's 'Krakken' Search Engine Marketing Tool, The Last Keyword Tool and Domain Web Studio (DWS). Her expertise with system design and databases allowed her to back engineer popular search engines and discover methods for Search Market Analysis and Competitive Analysis that turn SEO and search engine rankings into a science. This resulted in the creation of tools which make the life of an SEO/SEM easier by automating both the difficult and mundane aspects of Market Research, Keyword Research, Website Site Structural Design and Implementation. Sue retired from her career supporting the Military in her thirties and recently came out of retirement to mastermind the programing behind our powerful and proprietary market analysis tools. She currently enjoys living in the arid Arizona desert, spends her spare time dominating online markets, and is available on a limited bases for online marketing consultation and training.

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