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A themematic customer asked me today how to silo a website using Google’s Keyword Tool.

If you’ve never used Google’s Keyword Tool (free) for your keyword research, you should, because it has been improved to show search volume and search trends and gives your the SEPS (search engine proven synonyms) as well as other diverse keywords to use on your site.

The question as stated:

When I look at my main keyword in Google Adwords which is “{main keyword}”, the first set of words (keywords related to term) that are shown would be the “silos” of my website?nbsp; Then the second set of keywords (addtl words to consider) can you make some of these into silos too? (especially if there are higher ranking ones than is shown in the relevant terms?

My Answer:

The way I determine which keywords are Silos is a combination of traffic volume, theme relevance, and competition.

1) Traffic Volume - since each Silo is going to have Sub-Silos or Articles underneath it (in a tree structure), these keywords under the Silos that make up the Articles or Sub-Silos by definition are more ‘long tail’ and have less traffic and competition. Your Silos are the ones that have more traffic, more competition, and are ’short tail’.

So, look for keywords close related to your Parent Theme that are ’short-tail’, high traffic, and have more competition.  If the ‘Additional Words to Consider’ section has some of these (it will show you traffic volume and competition but not theme relevance), you need to determine if the keyword has ‘theme relevance’ to your Parent Theme.

2) Theme Relevance - Keywords can be related a number of ways.nbsp; Russell at ThemeZoom breaks it down by:

- Purely Diverse SEP

- Partially Diverse SEPS

- Statistically Improbably Phrases

- Purely Diverse

- Partially Diverse

- Technical Long-tails

What do those terms mean?

An example:

Parent Theme = Tattoo Design

- Purely Diverse SEPS = Celtic Tattooing (both words are different, but one is just a different form of one of the Parent Theme keyword, and one is completely different, but they are SEPS according to Google)
- Partially Diverse SEPS = Tattoo Designs (one word is just a different form of the Parent Theme, but SEPS according to Google)
- Statistically Improbably Phrases = Henna Art (both words are completely different)
- Technical Long-tails = Celtic Tattoo Design (just adding a word before or after the Parent Theme phrase makes it a long tail)

The other 2 I didn’t give examples of are the same as the SEPS versions, except the words aren’t SEPS.

Also, the above example is off the top of my head, not what Google actually considers SEPS for ‘Tattoo Design’

SO, based on the above, you would have to determine how closely related the high-traffic short-tails are to your main Parent Theme to decide if it should be a Silo.

3) Competition - check google using ‘allintitle:{keyword phrase in quotes}’ and ‘allinurl:{keyword phrase in quotes}’  to see how many other pages are SEO optimized.  Needless to say, the less competition, the easier to rank for it, so why make a long-tail, low-competition keyword a Silo when you can rank for it as an Article Title instead?

You want your Silos to be your market keywords that have lots of other stuff ‘under’ them in the keyword tree structure.

Bottom line is:  You have to use your head and not get bogged down with these decisions - if you work more on bank-links to your Article and Silo pages of your site and use ThemeMatic to build your site, you will rank for the more competitive terms use chose for your Silos over time in any case. These should be the ‘highly coveted’ keywords that are going to make you money and have lots of traffic.

Who cares if you are #1 in Google for ‘cheap celtic tattoo design patterns from Ireland’ if you are only going to get 1 visitor per year for that phrase?nbsp; I’m sure you could get to #1 in Google for a long-tail like that with your eyes closed, so the question is:

“What happens if I’m #1 in Google for ‘celtic tattoos’ or ‘tattoo art’ or something like that?

I received the following question from a ThemeMatic user:

“Hi Rob, I was looking at your backling course videos. Good suff. I have a software called market samurai that lists backlinks etc. I was wondering why google only shows me with 4 backlinks of any pr and they also have me listed as #10 for “home based business” in broad match, then when I use seo for firefox the same search term shows me #28. It seems also with all my rankings on “money” keywords I should be seeing a ton more traffic. I realize this is out of scope of themematic, but any input you could gine me on how to hit front page and get traffic would be appreciated.

…
Sidenote, am ranking fast on a lot of the phrases since implementing themematic siloing.

Thanks
Dean”

Here’s my reply:

Hi,
I’m not sure I understand your question, but here goes:
- Google doesn’t show all the links to your site it knows about - it keeps most of them secret and only shows a small sampling of links to prevent anyone from reverse-engineering their ranking algorithm.  A better tool to use is:
http://www.smartpagerank.com/pagerank-backlinks.php

You can also check backlinks in Yahoo by searching for:  link:http://www.mydomain.com  (with Yahoo, you have to have the http:// part)

- Since I don’t know what your site URL is, I cannot investigate what you are optimized for and why you aren’t ranking for what you are targeting.  However, just because a keyword is a ‘money’ keyword, doesn’t mean it is a keyword that gets lots of traffic.

I have ‘money’ keywords with over 50 million competing pages that show tons of traffic for the ‘theme cluster’ and I am ranked #1 in Google for this one-word keyword and STILL only see less than 100 visitors per day from that keyword.  Let me repeat that:  I am #1 in Google with an AUTHORITY listing (all of my Silos appear below my main site link as I’m sure you’ve seen some sites that achieve this much-coveted ‘authority’ listing) for a one-word (short-tail) keyword that has over 50 million competing pages, and STILL see less than 100 visitors per day for this keyword.

So, I wouldn’t put much stock in thinking high rankings for money keywords equals tons of traffic.  Long-tails collectively will get you more traffic than short-tails, which is why having a lot of different content with lots of keywords is a good strategy.

As for how to get traffic:

Search Engines account for only 5-10% of the available traffic.  While ThemeMatic and ThemeZoom is about getting Organic Rankings for Money Keywords, this should NOT be the only strategy you pursue for driving traffic to a web site.

I cannot possibly get into all the other ways to do it.  I guess when I get around to releasing a course that covers everything you may be interested in that.  Until then, I hope this helps.

I would like to use your question and my answer in a blog post for others to benefit from - let me know if that’s OK with you.

-Rob

First in a series of videos showing how massive, high-quality theme relevant links are created for a silo structure website to boost rankings in Google using the Remote Blogging strategy.

I am going to tell you how to get Multiple Google First Page Listings:

As you all know (or should know), ThemeMatic can get you on the top of Google. I posted not too long ago about the coveted ‘Indented Listings’ that ThemeMatic achieves automatically due to proper Silo structure in response to the Stompernet video that was inundating everyone’s email inbox at the time.

What you also know, and SHOULD BE DOING, is getting theme-relevant anchor text links (backlinks) to your deep pages of your site to benefit from buoyant page rank.

There are many ways to do this, including:

- Submit articles to ezinearticles.com and other high-ranked and HTML allowing article directories

- Post in related site’s forums and include a keyword anchor text backlink in your forum user profile (which will show in each post of the forum) - don’t SPAM the forum, CONTRIBUTE, but your link in your profile will go to your site

- Create content on content sharing sites like HubPages. Here’s one I did:

Multiple Google First Page Listings

Read it, then DO it. And by the way, your backlinks only get the rel=”nofollow” removed when your Hubber Score goes above 74 - you can read all about it on the HubPages site. Bottom line, produce QUALITY hub pages, promote them, and your backlinks will be as theme-relevant as you can get!

Well, well, well - it seems the fine folks at SEOQuake somehow got wind of my “Proof” video I recently uploaded where I use the SEOQuake toolbar to locate the backlinks to my pages.

They posted about it on the SEOQuake blog here:

http://blog.seoquake.com

Do you think I am getting traffic to my site from that little blog post of theirs? 

If you are on my email list, then you should have received the link for the video I made showing how ThemeMatic has gotten me top rankings on a couple of websites that I didn’t put much effort into.

In case you missed it, check it out at:

ThemeMatic Proof Video

I recently emailed everyone a link to a video I just made on Link Building. You can find the video on the ThemeMatic videos page:

ThemeMatic Videos

Once you have your ThemeMatic-built site up, it is critical to start work on getting theme-relevant anchor text backlinks to your site, preferably deep pages (article and silo pages) of your site which will benefit your keyword rankings on ALL pages of your site through ‘buoyant page rank’.

Some of you have the money to purchase these links from sites that sell them, and some of you don’t yet have the funds to do this. The above-referenced video, albeit a little rough around the edges (I produced it in one take while in a rush), shows you how to determine WHICH pages of your site should be priority #1 for acquiring quality inbound links (backlinks).

So what should you do if you can’t afford to buy these links? Here are a few of my favorite methods:

1) Post articles to article directories

2) Post in theme-relevant forums and be sure your forum user profile includes a signature with your keyword anchor text link

3) Tag your pages in the Social Networking sites like Digg, del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, Reddit, Squidoo, etc.

I will be producing some extensive tutorials on exactly HOW to do the above shortly.

You probably get lots of emails from all of the big internet marketers like I do.  Recently, I received multiple emails about this new, free video from StomperNet showing how to ‘double your traffic’.

Maybe you saw it, maybe you didn’t.  The point of it was that by getting the favored ‘double listing’ in Google, you will get twice as much traffic than if your listing in the SERPS has only one listing.  Andy Jenkins from StomperNet explains HOW to accomplish this by using ‘math’ and creating two pages with identical keyword densities and linking in a certain pattern between the pages.

OK, maybe that works, but if you built your site with ThemeMatic, IT HAPPENS AUTOMATICALLY.  I guess when you don’t have ThemeMatic, you have to come up with all sorts of tricks and gimmicks to accomplish what good old fashioned Silo site design accomplishes on its own.

Anyway, you don’t have to sign up on the next StomperNet email list for their newest product re-launch to get all of the juicy goodness that ‘double listings’ get you if you are using ThemeMatic.

I recently finished a MAJOR website for a client using LSI keywords, theme density, silo structure, etc. Because the client’s business is hosted entirely on NetSuite, I was not able to automatically build the site out with ThemeMatic, but all of the content was created with ThemeMatic and the manual editing of the site’s template pages was done to mimic the way that pages link together in ThemeMatic. For all intents and purposes, it is a ThemeMatic-built site, except the template pages were created specifically for this client. Anyway, the site is #2 in Google for the main theme keyword, and has MULTIPLE Top 10 results in both Google and Yahoo (and MSN). Suffice it to say, the client is VERY HAPPY and now I am working on link building to increase rankings across all of my best keywords.