The Importance of a Website Theme (day 5)

In order to understand Theming or establishing the theme of a website it is important to understand how the search engine spiders work.

Above all else the spiders are looking for relevance to a search engine users search query.

You may have heard that the key to gaining high rankings in the search engines is to get as many backlinks as possible. A backlink is when another website links to your website. Soon I will prove to you that this is not the case.

Relevance wins over backlinks every time!

The key to establishing relevance is to use Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) in conjunction with a solid silo designed website.

LSA is the analysis of rules established by the LSI algorithm (discussed in previous lessons).

When you couple LSA with a website designed using a Silo structure then you have the keys that you need to outrank 99% of the websites on the Internet.

The reason it is so easy to outrank most websites on the Internet is because they don't have a clue on how to combine LSA with a Silo web site design. They don't have a clue about it because it is not taught anywhere.

Why isn't it taught anywhere?

Because the fortune 500 companies and top SEO firms do not want the average webmaster to know about it. It is a very closely guarded secret.

The goal of this mini course is to open that secret world up to you so that you can easily implement the strategy for the purpose of gaining high search engine positions for all of your target keywords.

High search engine rankings equals high traffic. High traffic equals dollars.

What is a Silo Website Design Structure?

" . . . Siloing is pretty amazing stuff. It seems complicated when you first look at it, but I've had too many people, even intermediate level keyword researchers, have this giant "Eureka!" about it. Their entire paradigm about keyword research, market research, web development, and creating content sites- shifted in a single moment- as soon as they understood how this worked on the search engines . . . "  - Russell Wright

I know Silo Structure is not a term that everyone is familiar with but if you have done much traveling across the country you have seen many types of silos.

The reason I have used this term first is to make it clear how important a silo is to the theme and relevant structure of your web site.

If you have ever been on or near a farm you have seen a silo or maybe several.

The farmers use silos to store grain such as corn, wheat, barley and other types of feed.

The important thing to understand is they do not put corn in the same silo with wheat.

They do not mix any type of grain ever, absolutely not. You might say everything has it's place.

For example:

Let's say your website is about cars this would be the farm.

On the car farm you have:

• Car Accessories
• Engine Parts
• Car Insurance

Think of the different sub-themes of "car" as different grains that would be stored in their own silo.

You would never mix Car Accessories with Car Insurance or Engine Parts.

You would create a new directory or area of your website that are devoted to each topic or sub-theme of cars.

Doing this will avoid mixing content and confusing the search engine spiders.

Of course there is quite a bit more to it than this but this is a very simple and general explanation just to get your mind wrapped around the core concept of what a website silo is.

It should excite you to know that a website with a silo structure will almost always outrank a site without one because of the "theme density" of the silo as opposed to the non-silo site.

In many cases a silo structured site will outrank a non-siloed site that has hundreds and even thousands of backlinks linking in.

Here's a case study example of this point:

Keyword: rc helicopter - 1,600,000 competing pages on Google

SITE 1: Heliguy.com

• Is a well siloed site
• Has a PR4
• Has 201 backlinks
• Google position 4

SITE 2: Hobbytron.com

• Is not a well siloed site
• Has a PR5
• Has 3,500 backlinks
• Google position 15

Conventional logic would say that SITE 2 should be the clear winner in the rankings but it isn't.

SITE 1 is the winner even though it has 3,300 less backlinks and has less of a PR rating.

The main reason behind this is the silo structure of SITE 1 as opposed to SITE 2. Another major reason is a phenomenon called "Theme Bleeding".

SITE 2 is bleeding theme like a stuck pig where SITE 1 is not.

SITE 1 is theming for the keyword "rc helicopter" better than SITE 2


The next lesson will be about theme bleeding and we will dig into more case study examples.

Don't let any of this stuff intimidate you. It is really very simple to implement once you understand it all.

Until next time,

Charles Heflin
Professional SEO Advisor / Consultant
SEO 20/20