Site Architecture

How To Build PERFECT SEO Silos on Wordpress (Step by Step) 07/12/2022, 11:41
How To Build PERFECT SEO

Silos on Wordpress (Step by
Step)
2 — Improve Authority Flow and Indexing
Poor website architecture is like a messy Desktop.
It’s unbearable.
But you shouldn’t try to organize your site and build tidy SEO silos just for
me.
You should do it for your rankings.
https://www.authorityhacker.com/site-architecture/ 1
Growth of securitynerd.com, a well-structured, low DR site in a

competitive niche.
Good site architecture will push your rankings up and allow you to compete
with much stronger — but less organized — domains.
So if you want to learn how to organize your site, make it rank higher, and
make your visitors (including me) happier, keep reading!
What is website architecture?

Website architecture or site architecture is the structure you use to
organize your website. The structure refers to the website hierarchy of
pages, categories, and sections and how the users and search crawlers
navigate between your pages.
Why website architecture is important

1 — Rank Higher on Google
The main reason why you should care about website architecture is to
improve your rankings on Google.
And it’s true — great site architecture will make sure your pages rank better
for your target keywords.
Even Google’s John Muller recommends people structure their website

properly.
But how exactly does good website structure achieve higher rankings?
First, good site structure and internal linking help search engine crawlers
find and index your pages more efficiently.
Good website architecture helps crawlers find your pages
If your pages are not well-linked, it will be harder for the crawlers to find
them and give you more organic traffic.
Unlinked pages are harder to crawl, index and rank.
Unlinked pages are harder to crawl, index and rank
But good website structure isn’t just about indexability.
After all, your XML sitemap could fill the gap here.
Good website architecture gives context to search engines so they

understand what your page is about in the grand scheme of your whole
website.
For example:
Let’s imagine that you have a generalist sports site, and one of your pages
is about the best tennis rackets for left-handed players.
You could just link to all your pages from your home page, but, given that
the scope of your site is quite large, it would probably be a mess and you
may end up with thousands of links on your homepage — something which
is going to be confusing both for search engines and users.
Instead, the best way to approach this is to break down your top-level topic
by sports.
Following each sport, you may have another level of category pages that
breaks the topic down by items used in this sport.
And then, below the racket level is where our “best tennis rackets for left-
handed players” page would fit.
Google then understands EXACTLY how your web pages fit into the topic
by looking into what the parent category pages are about.
Another benefit of adopting a well-organized website architecture is that

page rank flows better throughout your website.
This means that by the sheer fact that a page gains internal links logically
and contextually, the PageRank coming from external links will flow to all
the related pages and help them rank higher on Google.
An excellent example of great use of this principle would be the

website Security.org.
On their homepage, they highlight the 3 main fields they specialize in:
As you click on home security systems, you land on an article targeting that
keyword but with a top navigation to the lower level.
Then, that link sends you to “best home security cameras.”
As you scroll through this article, it has a classic comparison table that links
you to individual reviews.
And when you click on one of these links, you land on a detailed review of
the product.
This logical internal linking flow maximizes the external links they get on all
the top pages, meaning that the authority flows all the way down to single
review pages.
This may explain why this last single review page gets more than 3,000
organic traffic, according to Ahrefs (that’s a lot!), even though it only has 5
external referring domains.
3 — Better user experience
Finally, last but not least, logical information architecture and website

layout make your site easier to navigate for the user.
This makes them more likely to explore it, convert, recommend, and all the
other good things that come with a great user experience.
And, if you are part of the group who believes Google uses these metrics to
rank pages, this may also increase your rankings.
Website architecture best practices

Now that we understand why website architecture is so important, let’s look
at the core principles you should follow to achieve top SEO rankings
through website architecture.
1 — Plan, Plan, Plan
The worst thing you can do for your website architecture is to randomly
create pages and posts without thinking about where they’ll fit in your site’s
overall structure.
… And I know this because I’ve done it.
Here’s how you can make sure you won’t live with same regrets I do:
1 . Do your keyword research and build an extensive list
The first step of the process is to do keyword research and build a big list of
keywords you’d like to rank for.
I won’t go into the details here, but we recently did a live stream that shows
how you can find your keywords:
Once you have them, we like to use the free version of Dynalist.io — a
minimalist app that helps organize ideas — to plan our SEO silos.
In the beginning, the list looks quite plain:
2. Categorize your keywords and organize them like you would

organize folders on your computer
Once you have completed your list, you need to start creating categories
and subcategories for keywords that belong together.
3. Do complementary keyword research
Once you’ve organized the keywords you already have, you can do
complementary keyword research by zooming into each section.
For example, let’s expand the gear section:
4. Do keyword research for your hub pages
Once each section has been expanded, it’s time to look for a relevant
keyword for your hub pages.
For example, my “gear” page can target the keyword “best paintball gear”
It’s not the best keyword in terms of difficulty, but I have no doubt I can at
least snag some long-tail traffic.
Plus, we’ve seen Google rank quality hub pages very well lately.
2 — Follow The 3 Clicks Rule

One of the core, and most simple, rules to follow when it comes to high-
quality site structure is:
All your important pages should be reachable within maximum 3 clicks from
your Home Page.
While this is not a “hard” rule and it won’t drop all your rankings if you go
past it slightly, it’s still a good personal guideline to follow.
It keeps things simple for you, the site owner.
And it makes navigating your site easier for users and search engine
crawlers.
So, try to make sure your Dynalist only goes a maximum of 3 levels below
your homepage.
However, while it’s really easy to follow this rule at the beginning of a site’s
life, it’s much harder to stick with it as your site grows.
But trust me, from experience, I can tell that the sites where we followed
this advice were much easier to grow — they were easier to do keyword
research for and so tended to do better.
As an example, a site that tends to do an excellent job at this is none other
than Apple.com.
When you arrive on their site, Apple makes you first choose a product
category:
Then a product line:
And then you can either explore the product or buy right away with your 3rd
click:
That makes your 4th click the one where you give them a whole bunch of
money and complete the checkout:
A simple, elegant, and effective application of the 3 clicks theory.
3 — Create Custom Content Hubs
If you want link equity to flow efficiently through your website, you
unfortunately can not rely on basic WordPress category pages to achieve
that.
Why?
Because by default, they only link to 10 posts in a given category.
These kinds of auto-generated archive pages are not great for

internal linking or user experience.
Also, pagination is a nightmare in terms of link equity efficiency. It makes

older content harder to reach both for users and search engine crawlers.
Good luck applying the 3 click rule with these.
Imagine the posts between pages 4 and 83 here — how do they get link
equity?
On top of that, because they have no unique content, these default

category pages are deemed “low value” by Google.
This makes it hard for you to link build because, well, they’re just not very
attractive.
But your hub pages are one of the most valuable places to acquire links to.
The links don’t just lift these pages up — they also lift up all the pages
below.
For all these reasons, you should build custom content hubs.
content hub Concept ideas
1. The list blog post hub (Authority Hacker)
A simple way to build a hub is to use the list post format where each bullet
point links to a lower-level page. It’s easy to build and a great page
template you can easily build links to and rank for a competitive keyword.
Example: https://www.authorityhacker.com/best-niches-affiliate-marketing/
2. The Glossary (WP Beginner)
A glossary can be a clever way to build a huge and valuable hub of pages
on your site. Each term can have its own page and be optimized for long-
tail variations of a short tail keyword.
Example: https://www.wpbeginner.com/glossary/
3. The blog post with top navigation (Security.org)
Finally, you can also use normal blog posts as hubs and alter your page
layout to show top-level navigation above the fold. This saves you from
having to create extra pages and allows the user to go deeper into your site
if it makes sense for them.
Example: https://www.security.org/digital-safety/
But how do I build these holy WordPress silos, you say?
Glad you asked!
How To Build SEO Silos In WordPress: Step By Step

If you’re using posts and categories, WordPress unfortunately does not
offer an easy way to build custom category pages.
But there is still a way around it — albeit in a bit of a dirty way.
Step 1: Build a page or post that will act as your new category page
First, warm up your designer skills and put together a valuable hub page or
post.
I recommend using a plugin like GenerateBlocks to create an attractive

layout.
Then, I like to format these as a list of sections with a blurb related to it and
a clear call to action — to either convert on an offer (product choice), or to
direct to the next page deeper.
Note that I also link to the child page in this structure using an anchor
text that includes my main keyword (“best paintball masks”).
This helps increase the target keyword’s relevancy, and allows search
engines to know exactly what to rank the page for.
Step 2: Redirect the default WordPress category page to your page or

post
Once your silo page is done and published, it’s time to replace the default
WordPress category page with the post or page you just created.
For this, we will simply redirect it.
I like to use the built-in Rankmath‘s redirection function for this:

But, if you’re using a different SEO plugin, you can also use the excellent
and free Redirection WordPress option.
Every time your category shows up in a breadcrumb or post grid, clicking it

will direct people to your custom silo page.
Plus, as Google has stopped dropping page rank through redirects, there
are not many downsides to this solution other than what may be a slightly
slower load time due to the redirection.
30x redirects don't lose PageRank anymore.
— Gary 鯨理／경리 Illyes (@methode) July 26, 2016
If you are using pages to publish your content, you can create hub pages
and internally link them to each other using a flat URL structure.
You can also use the parent pages system and the excellent — and free
— nested pages plugin for WordPress to quickly and easily rebuild your
Dynalist in the pages section.
Your URLs will then be nested. Which means moving content around is a
bit of a no-no since it would change its URLs, but that’s how you’d build the
hard silos version of this.
4 — Abuse Internal Linking

The final touch to your perfect website architecture will be your approach to
internal linking in the content.
We’ve established in the past that more relevant internal links highly
correlate with high higher rankings by analyzing over 1 million of them.
Historically, when reading about SEO silos, you’ve probably read about the
idea of “keeping link juice in the silo” and only internally linking to pages
that are in the same site section.
We disagree with this.
We believe that, in content, as long as it contextually makes sense to link to

another page of your site, you should do it.
Of course, that is assuming you’ve built your silo/hub pages the way we
described above and that overall, it’s easy to navigate down the levels of
your website.
If you learn by observation, you will notice that many successful sites do
not respect this internal linking siloing rule inside their content.
The most popular of them is Wikipedia.
But a more practical example is the folks over at Security.org.
However, finding relevant internal link opportunities across your site can be
a challenge, especially if your website is quite large.
But don’t worry, I have a tool for you that’s 100% free and will do a lot of the
heavy lifting.
And that is the free Ahrefs webmaster tools.
I know some of you are probably raising your eyebrows, because Ahrefs is

not known for this.
But if you go in their Site Audit tool:
And then select the “link opportunities report”:
You can then set the filtering as so:
This tool will then look at all the keywords the page ranks for (not just your
one target keyword) and suggest pages mentioning these keywords to add
internal links to.
Then just click on the target page and add your internal link.
Voila! Finally, an easy way to deal with internal linking for your website!
Alternatively, you could also consider using Link Whisper on your site (See
what I did here? )
When it comes to anchor text, you are pretty unlikely to get hit with over-
optimization penalties for internal links — so don’t hesitate to use an
anchor text that includes your target keywords.
Conclusion
Website architecture does not have to be complicated.
You just need to establish a hierarchical site structure and stick to it as you
expand.
This predictability makes it easier for users and search engine crawlers
alike to understand and navigate your website.
Follow these simple rules:

How To Achieve Top Website Architecture
Plan your website architecture, don’t just create pages on the fly
All important pages should be within 4 clicks of your homepage
Build custom content hubs
Use internal links abundantly when it contextually makes sense
If you want to hear more of us geeking out on site architecture, I

recommend you watch this podcast I did with topic expert Kyle Roof on that
subject:
FAQ
How Important Is Site Architecture For My Rankings,
Really?
This is the million-dollar question: Is it worth the hassle?
How much higher will your site rank if you follow these recommendations?
As always in SEO, the answer is “it depends.”
In general, for small websites with few pages and few links, site
architecture will matter less when it comes to rankings. You could probably
just let WordPress do its thing without much consequences.
However, when categories get big, a lot of pagination in archives starts to

pop up. The link equity is not well distributed throughout the site.
An at this point — yes, fixing your site architecture can have significant
benefits for your SEO.
In my experience, it’s a good idea to make a reasonable attempt at a clean

site structure when you get started.
But, if the scope of your project is not very large, don’t sweat it if you break
a few rules here or there.
What Tools Can I Use To Visualize My Site Architecture?
Internally, we use the free version of Dynalist.io to plan our sitemaps.
The vertical mind mapping and easy-to-collapse sections allow for a

complex site mapping without hassle.
If you don’t like it, you can either default back to a more classic sitemap tool
like MindMeister, or you can go for something more elaborate like
FlowMapp.
What Is The Difference Between Silos, Hubs, And

Categories?
They’re the same! That’s why I use them interchangeably in the content
above.
It just depends on who you listen to and how guru hyped the website you
are reading is. The naming convention is quite fluid.
Be careful though — some people mean different things when using similar
terms, so make sure you ask for a definition when talking to someone
about it.
Should I Use Pages Or Blog Posts To Build My Silo

Structure?
It’s up to you! In the eyes of Google, a web page is a web page, and they
don’t really care if you used the page or blog post function inside
WordPress.
I detail how to build your site architecture with either in the content above,
so pick your poison — but make sure to stay consistent once you have
made a choice!
Should I Nest My URLs Or Not?
For those who are not sure what this means, nested URLs are when you
have multiple subfolders showing the different levels of categorization
inside your URL’s:
And, you guessed it, the answer is: “it depends.”
The pros of building your site architecture this way is that it gives a very
straightforward structure for both users and search crawlers (as well as
you) to follow.
The cons are that you can’t change your mind on where your content goes
in your website as changing the “hub” you put it in would change the URL.
For this reason, if you’re a beginner, you are probably better off avoiding
nested URLs.
If you’re a pro, however, you know what you are doing. So, up to you.
What Do I Do If Given A Page That Belongs To 2

Hubs/Silos?
This is a tough one, and is a situation that will happen to you for sure.
To bring back our paintball example, let’s say you had a product
review targeting the keyword “Tippman a 5 review.”
Should you put it under the /brand/tippman/ section or the /paintball-guns/

section?
There is no perfect solution here; you just need to pick one and stick to it
when similar situations occur.
The last thing you want is to have half of your product review under brands
and the other half under paintball guns.
This is also why you should not limit your internal linking within the same
hub.
It’s totally fine to link from /brand/tippman/ to the reviews even if they are
hosted under /paintball-guns/.
Should I Change My URLs To Match What You’ve Been

Teaching In This Post?
Generally no.
But again, it depends.
If you started your site last week, I would probably do it.
If you get any significant search traffic already, know that even if you
correctly redirect the old URL to the new one, you are playing a bit of a
Russian roulette game with your rankings.
This is why it’s not usually worth it, and why you’re better off living with your
mistakes and making the most of what you have.

Site Architecture

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Description:

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Site Architecture

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

How To Build PERFECT SEO Silos on Wordpress (Step by Step) 07/12/2022, 11:41

How To Build PERFECT SEO

Poor website architecture is like a messy Desktop.

You should do it for your rankings.

Growth of securitynerd.com, a well-structured, low DR site in a

What is website architecture?

Why website architecture is important

Even Google’s John Muller recommends people structure their website

Good website architecture helps crawlers find your pages

Unlinked pages are harder to crawl, index and rank.

Unlinked pages are harder to crawl, index and rank

But good website structure isn’t just about indexability.

Good website architecture gives context to search engines so they

Another benefit of adopting a well-organized website architecture is that

An excellent example of great use of this principle would be the

Then, that link sends you to “best home security cameras.”

3 — Better user experience

Finally, last but not least, logical information architecture and website

Website architecture best practices

1 — Plan, Plan, Plan

… And I know this because I’ve done it.

1 . Do your keyword research and build an extensive list

In the beginning, the list looks quite plain:

2. Categorize your keywords and organize them like you would

3. Do complementary keyword research

For example, let’s expand the gear section:

4. Do keyword research for your hub pages

2 — Follow The 3 Clicks Rule

It keeps things simple for you, the site owner.

As an example, a site that tends to do an excellent job at this is none other

Then a product line:

A simple, elegant, and effective application of the 3 clicks theory.

3 — Create Custom Content Hubs

These kinds of auto-generated archive pages are not great for

Also, pagination is a nightmare in terms of link equity efficiency. It makes

Good luck applying the 3 click rule with these.

On top of that, because they have no unique content, these default

content hub Concept ideas

1. The list blog post hub (Authority Hacker)

3. The blog post with top navigation (Security.org)

But how do I build these holy WordPress silos, you say?

Glad you asked!

How To Build SEO Silos In WordPress: Step By Step

But there is still a way around it — albeit in a bit of a dirty way.

I recommend using a plugin like GenerateBlocks to create an attractive

Step 2: Redirect the default WordPress category page to your page or

For this, we will simply redirect it.

I like to use the built-in Rankmath‘s redirection function for this:

Every time your category shows up in a breadcrumb or post grid, clicking it

— Gary 鯨理／경리 Illyes (@methode) July 26, 2016

4 — Abuse Internal Linking

We disagree with this.

We believe that, in content, as long as it contextually makes sense to link to

The most popular of them is Wikipedia.

But a more practical example is the folks over at Security.org.

And that is the free Ahrefs webmaster tools.

I know some of you are probably raising your eyebrows, because Ahrefs is

But if you go in their Site Audit tool:

And then select the “link opportunities report”:

You can then set the filtering as so:

Follow these simple rules:

All important pages should be within 4 clicks of your homepage