How To Build PERFECT SEO Silos on WordPress (Step by Step) - 04-14-2021

Do you want to learn how to rank high on Google while building less links? If the answer is yes, and come on, we all know it is, then this video is for you. In this video, I will first show you how website architecture works and how it helps your rankings. Then I'll show you real life examples of websites that are killing it with their website architecture. And finally, I'll show you how to do it exactly on your own website, step by step on WordPress.

So I hope you're excited. But before we get started, I have two announced months to make. First, according to YouTube Analytics, only 50% of the people who watch our videos are subscribed to the channel. So if you are not subscribed, feel free to click on the button below and the notification bell so that you don't miss any of our videos. Additionally, feel free to smash that like button while you're there because it really helps us reach more people.

Second, Authority Hacker Pro, our most advanced training, is coming back next week, and it's the first time we're launching it this year. So if you want to be sure that you don't miss this opportunity to join in, go on Authorityhacker.com Slash Pro and sign up our email list. But for now, let's dive into the video. And let's start with first things first. There are three main reasons why you probably want to get your shit together when it comes to organizing your website.

First, it helps Google index your pages. The way Google discovers new pages is by following links on the pages they already know, and usually Google recalls URLs that have more authority more frequently. So if your URLs are well linked from these pages, they will essentially appear on Google quicker. The second reason, and that's probably what you're here for, is to rank high on Google. When you have a good website architecture, it means that your pages are well interlinked together.

And essentially that lets the page rank or link drinks for some people flow better within your website. And you get more bang for your buck for all the external links that are pointing to your website in terms of pushing your rankings out. And additionally, as confirmed by John Miller, having a well organized pyramid style website structure will give more context to Google as to what your pages are about based on how they are linked to from other pages, and help Google rank you for more relevant keywords in the end. And I explain all of this in a lot more detail in the companion blog post that comes with this video. So if you want to see all the examples and quotes, go on Authorityhacker.com site Architecture.

And the third reason why you probably want to push your website architecture to be better than it is right now is to improve user experience and make people browse more pages on your site. Spend more time, visit more pages, reduce your bounce rate. All these metrics that according to a lot of SEOs are also ranking factors that Google is looking at, which could in turn improve your rankings. So now that we've talked about why you should care about website architecture, let's go in the field and I want to show you a website that does a really good job at linking their pages together and having a really coherent structure. And after that, I'll show you how you can do it yourself.

The site that I chose to show you is Security and if you check their traffic in ahrefs, yes, they have been shaken a bit by core updates, but overall having over 300K estimated traffic after only 1.5 years of being really active is still pretty good in my book. So if we start with their homepage, they are using the fact that their homepage is getting a lot of links like most websites to highlight their three core silos. Right on top of that page. They have home security systems. Smart Home and Automation and Digital Security.

Notice how all of these also are text links so that they can put anchor text in these links. And as you click on one of them, say, home security system, you land on an article targeting that keyword but with a top navigation to the lower level. Then if you click on like the security camera button it sends you to a classic roundup review on best home security cameras. And then the site structure doesn't stop here because as you scroll down the article you will find a comparison table that then links to individual reviews of each camera. So if I click on a Ring Camera review, for example, I land on a single review that is targeting Ring Camera Review as a keyboard.

So you can see how only with a few clicks I managed to get all the way down to a single review. And this internal linking structure maximizes the way page rank flows between pages and essentially allows pages like this Ring Camera Review to rank for over 900 organic keywords and have an estimated of over 3100 organic traffic as per ATRIS with only five referring domains because it's pushed up mainly by its internal links. So now that you have a good idea how that works on a real life site, let's see how you can actually do that with your WordPress site and do something similar to security. And the first step is going to be a rather boring one to most people, but that's going to be planning. And if you want to have a clean website architecture, you cannot just go ahead, log in on WordPress and add random pages to your site without thinking really where they're going to fit into the whole website because your site is going to be a huge mess rather quickly.

So let me walk you through my planning system and how you can do it yourself. The first step, as for most planning when it comes to SEO is to make a massive list of keywords that you could potentially rank for. But usually I like to make a list of all keywords at the beginning that are semi relevant to what I'm doing. I'm not going to go over how to do that because I have done a massive livestream recently that you can check out above if you want to see me do live keyword research in the personal finance niche. So if you want to put together your list of keywords, just go ahead and watch that live stream and then come back to this video.

Once you have your list of keywords, I like to dump them in Dynalist IO, which is a free minimalist mind mapping tool that really helps you organize your ideas and essentially plan your silos better. For the sake of the example, let's pretend we are building a paintball site here. And what I would do is I would just start a new Dynalist document called it Paintball Site and then dump all my keywords in one list inside Dynalist. I know it looks rather plain, but don't worry, we are going to be improving this soon. The second step is going to be categorizing keywords.

So you're going to build a second level on your Dynalist where you essentially name categories and then put keywords that belong together under these categories. If you struggle with this, think about organizing files on your computer and how you would do folders and subfolders to put files in the right place. So in my Paintball example, for example, I would have a category for guns, I would have a category for Gear, I would have a category for local fields, and I would maybe have a guides category that answer common questions about paintball. Once you've done that, the first step is to do complementary keyword research on a category level. Usually once you have defined your categories, it is quite easy to find more keywords for a given category because you can identify the keyword footprint and find more of them.

So I suggest you extend your keyword list so you plan for pretty much any scenario of expansion of your website in the future. In the case of my Paintball example, I decided to expand the gear section where I found best paintball knee pad, best Paintball elbow pad, best Paintball helmet, et cetera as extra keywords. As I did my keyword research during that phase, feel free to move your categories. Again, everything is fluid until you really start building your website. So don't be afraid to move things around and brainstorm and try different methods to organize your content.

Once you're done with that, it's time to do keyword research for your categories or hubs. Essentially what we want to do is we want to find a keyword that is semi good for these hubs so that we can at least try to get some traffic to them when we're going to be building these custom Hub pages. So, for example, here I found the keyword best paintball gear. It's not amazing, it has medium keyword difficulty and not a crazy amount of traffic, but still, I'm pretty sure I'll be able to get some long tail traffic from it if I optimize my page for it. One note that I want to add on building your custom site structure, try to not go deeper than three or four levels in UX.

Usually you don't want to go deeper than three level. It's called the rule of three clicks, where people should find what they need to find in three clicks or less. Again, I talk a lot more about this in the companion blog post, this video. So go on Atarihacker.com sitearchitecture if you want to read more about it. Once you have your site structure ready, it's time to consider building it on your live site.

And I have a bit of a bad news for you if you're using WordPress. Like most people, WordPress category pages are the worst for site architecture. Why? Because a given category, by default, only links to ten blog posts. And after that, there is a pagination at the bottom of the page that links to other pages that only link to ten blog posts.

And that completely kills the rule of three clicks that we mentioned just now, which is bad for the user, but also for the page rank flow inside your website, which will in turn make you rank lower. On top of that, WordPress category pages look a bit shit. They have no unique content, they're not seen as valuable pages, which is kind of a shame when your category pages are essentially the best pages on your site to get links to, because they then juice up hundreds of pages if you build them properly. So how do you build quality Hub pages on WordPress? Well, I'm glad you asked, because I'm going to show you right now.

But I have a bit of a disclaimer. First, if you are using posts and Categories, like most people to post your content on WordPress, there's no clean way to do that. There is a way, and I'm going to show it to you, but some people will consider it a little bit dirty. But let's just show you. Step one is going to create a new page on WordPress and essentially design the Hub page of your dreams.

If you're not using a page builder, I recommend you use generate blocks to put together an attractive layout. If you are building affiliate sites and link to different product categories, I like to build this page as a list of sections with a blog related to it and a clear code action to either convert on an offer so I show them the best mask in that case or to go a page deeper on the lower level of my site structure. Usually it's for a big button that links to it with a precise anchor text. And the anchor text that you are going to be using to link to a lower level is very important to give context to Google and do all that increased relevancy stuff we talked about at the beginning of the video. Once you're done designing your silo page, you just need to redirect your default WordPress category page that looks ugly with the Temp post to the new custom page that you've built.

These days I use Rankmatch redirection module for that. But if you don't have redirection inside your SEO plugin, you can use the free Redirections plugin on the WordPress repository. Just go in the redirect section, create a new one, and then put the default category URL in the source URL and your new page on the destination URL. Try to make the redirect as 301 and add the redirection. So now every time your category is mentioned in a breadcrumb or in the post meta, et cetera, it's going to be redirecting to your custom page.

And I know some people are going to be cringing to that solution because there is a redirect here and redirects historically had been losing a bit of page rank every time they happen, which is not ideal. But Gary Owes from Google recently tweeted that redirects do not lose page rank anymore. So it's not going to penalize you in terms of page rank flow on your website. And if you look at very successful affiliate sites like Outdoor Gear Lab, that's essentially what they're doing. They're redirecting their category pages.

For those of you who use pages to publish their content. You can either just do everything manually and just create hub pages that manually link to other pages on a flat silo structure, or you can use the WordPress parent pages function that allows you to specify your parent page to a given page so that you can create a hard silo structure where essentially every category is inside the URL. And it's a little bit more descriptive than the previous solutions. When we build hard silos on a new site, I like to use the free Nested Pages plugin that you can find on the WordPress repository. Essentially, it allows you to copy one to one the Dynalis sitemap that you have prepared on your WordPress site and change the place of pages on your website by drag and dropping them, which is really nice.

Just be aware that if you are building hot silos that way, it's going to be hard to recategorize content later. So make sure that when you put a page somewhere in your site, you have planned properly for it, because you could be losing your rankings if you're moving it to another category. So if you're not sure, use the post and category solution I mentioned before. And the final touch to your perfect website architecture is going to be the way you're handling internal linking inside your content. We have established in a past case study where we studied more than 1 million internal links, that internal links from highly authoritative pages correlate very highly with higher rankings.

So it's really important how you're going to manage that. And if you read about historical content on SEO, silos, et cetera, you will read a lot about self contained silos, which is a theory where pages within a silo or section of your site should only link to other pages within that silo or section. We actually disagree on that. We like to link to any page on the website as long as it's contextually relevant within the content. And if you learn SEO by observation rather than georatization, you will notice that many successful websites do that as well.

The most well known being Wikipedia. Wikipedia links to any page within Wikipedia when it contextually makes sense. And if we want to take an example to a business that's a bit closer to yours, security does the same and they're killing it in the rankings. But finding relevant internal linking opportunities can be a challenge and take a lot of time. So I decided to give you three quick, easy and free ways to do that for your website.

The first one is just going to be using Google. You are going to use an advanced query where you're going to put Site column, and then you're going to be putting your URL and then a keyword that is close to the keyword you're trying to rank for your page. Google will then return the pages on your site that seem to be the most relevant to that keyword and often have internal linking opportunities. So just go ahead and add your link on these pages. The second solution that you look at and is going to surprise a lot of people is Ahrefs.

And I know Ahrefs is not known for internal linking opportunity but actually within their free tier. So you don't even need to pay for it. If you go in the site audit section and then in link opportunities, you can add the same filtering as I'm showing you on the screen right now. Just change the URL to the URL you want to build internal links to and then the tool automatically will look at all the keywords that the page ranks for, not just your one target keyword, but all the long tail keywords and suggest pages that mention these keywords. So then you just need to click on the source page URL, edit in WordPress and add your link.

And if you still don't have enough internal linking opportunities from these two, you can add the free Link Whisper plugin on your WordPress site and essentially get a bunch of recommendations within WordPress on internal linking opportunities. You will need to pay for the plugin if you want to one click add these links. But you can use the free version to just get the suggestions if you want. So if you combine all three of these methods, internal linking should really not be a problem and not take too much time when it comes to the anchor text for your internal links, feel free to go quite heavy on keywords here. I've pretty much never seen a website get penalized for over optimizing the anchor text on their internal links.

And that pretty much concludes the video. Website architecture does not have to be as complicated as many people try to make it be. You just need to establish a simple structure that you will keep following on your website and plan things properly. After that, make sure that you build content hubs and that you have proper internal linking and you will have a better site architecture than most people. So what takeaway from this video?

Are you going to take and apply on your website? Let me know in the comments below. I'm always interested to know what interests you and what you actually got from this video, so I'll be looking forward to reviews. If you enjoyed this video, don't forget to subscribe and give it a thumbs up. It really helps us.

And if you want more videos like that, more thumbs up usually motivates me. And finally, if you enjoy that kind of content and you want more right now, go ahead and go on Autoehacker.com Pro and sign up for our email list because our most advanced training is opening up for a really short time really soon, so you don't want to miss that. So I hope you enjoyed this video and I'll see you in the next one. You it's.