Chris Litchfield - Digital Marketing Consultant | SEO And Sponsored Search | Online Business Development | Charlotte NC

Natural search engine optimization is the conveyance of data through an information clearing house for easier indexing and more readability by the human eye.  The search engines have a complicated job to do, and without assistance, may never truly uncover hidden content for display. As a result, your website ranks poorly because its information spread is too wide, trying to rank for too many keywords at the same time.  The restructuring of your information into silos for indexing is a fundamental SEO tactic that leads to higher conversion and more prominent placement in search results.

 

Utilizing the Information Silo

The information silo is created using existing content on your website.  Whereas most websites have sections dealing with Product A and other parts dealing with Product B, the silo theory dictates that each Product or Category online be compartmentalized into its own section, semi-connected to the parent site, but standing on its own foundations.

Think of your website as housing.  Is it an apartment complex dealing with multiple unrelated tenants in the same building, under the same roof?  Or are they housed in single family homes, unrelated except for a common landlord?

When we restructure website content, we should always look at the relationship between the content and work to group the similar parts together.  Other, unrelated parts we should break off and host parallel to the website.  What you will start to see happen over time in SEO is the silo information grouped and tagged as similar content will rank higher for those niche keywords, long-tailed keywords, and eventually, the category keywords.  Product A now ranks better for Product A keywords, while Product B, free from the constraints of being associated with Product A, ranks better because 100% of the keywords, URLs and content reflect information about Product B.  The same is true with Product A.

So the information silo theory reflects a SEO practice to group similar content under a related URL, while unassociated content gets cordoned off into its own silo.  Each does better on its own when the web page more directly reflects the content you want ranked better.

Back in the earlier days of the evolution of the internet many, if not all of the web development experts out there had learned and implemented one main output of web design formatting known as HTML. This hypertext markup language is the presentational output of any coding a developer might have done in scripting languages such as .php and .cfm. And yet, coding people are not necessarily designers. A designers mind works different than a developer, and they all must work in a sphere of online marketing/sales influence that rarely anyone completely understood.

As far as the link between web development and marketing goes, this was a mess. It also gave rise to black hat SEO as many spammers found ways to manipulate tables and borders with HTML to hide code, start ‘keyword stuffing’, and generally beat up a website’s professional appearance to gain more traffic. In coordination with new search engine technology and efforts to standardize the appearance and present-ability of all web pages across all types of browsers, CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) and table-less design was born.

So why is CSS table-less design so important or so much better than plain old HTML? Effectively, a designer can make a page look exactly the same in both tabled and table less design if all other things are equal, so it shouldn’t matter, as some claim. However, in CSS, presentation is separated from content. Style sheets were able to format information in a cascade, meaning all elements with <p> tags, for instance, are the same predefined format. The similar situation occurs with a <div> tag, as specific div tags containing specific information could be formatted using a single style sheet. Adding these completed div elements to any webpage eliminates the need for tables and creates control of the look and formatting from one singular location.

This new, cleaner method of design influences search ability and relevance of the website, two essential elements of solid web design that makes marketing one’s product or service on the internet much easier. Here are five reasons to work inside the box, using standardized methods to increase your website’s presence: