A Complete Guide To WordPress Silo

Many bloggers put a lot of effort into their content and the relevance of the blog post, trying to make it as timeless as possible so that the Google Gods can bless them with traffic for months to come. But often, bloggers don’t realise or pour much attention into the structure of their blog itself.

Sure, they may want their blog to look pretty and they’ll put hours of work into making their website look sophisticated, but the architecture of the website is not something a lot of bloggers pay attention towards, at least the amateur ones. This is where Silo comes in. Silo is a strong and effective tool to completely change the feel of your website, making it easy to navigate among many other benefits. In this article, we’re going to get into the nitty-gritty of siloing and what it’s all about, and of course, what the best WordPress Silo Plug-ins are.

What is Silo?

Have you ever had a bad teacher? Not the stereotypical kind who berated every student and was extremely strict, but the well-meaning kind who just wouldn’t teach properly? He’d be an expert on the subject but he wouldn’t be able to teach you the subject properly. He’d teach you chapters and themes in random orders and talk about things that seemed related but you couldn’t figure out how they were related because he just wouldn’t go about teaching in a structured way. This kind of a bad teacher is exactly what a typical non-silo website is like.

It has all the information but it doesn’t present it in a structured way so it’s hard to navigate through the website which leads to less engagement. Silo counters that. Silo structures your entire website on the basis of niches and keywords and presents it in an easy-to-navigate, SEO-friendly way. It groups together relevant information under separate topics, making your website look much cleaner.

Why use Silo?

There are a number of reasons to use Silo and all of them are extremely helpful. The main ones, however, stand out because they give you a lot of benefits for very little effort.

Readability– In a world where almost half the population of the entire planet uses the internet, there is an abundance of information on the internet. This means that there are many blogs that are writing about the same subject as you. And since there’s so much information out there, if your blog isn’t easy to navigate, people will just switch over to one that is. y

This is why the structure and readability and accessibility of your website is extremely important. Silo is an easy way to make your website structured and neat so that one can easily peruse through the content you post.

SEO benefits– Google loves niche websites with topics that are relevant to those specific websites. For this reason, if a tech website posts about fashion tips, Google won’t promote it as much as it would a fashion website talking about fashion tips.

When you use Silo, you group together all the posts about similar topics and interlink them with each other, making Google recognise your posts and giving you more visibility on its webpage.

How does it work?

Silo is not native to WordPress so implementing it on a WordPress site is harder. What you need to do to implement Silo is to organise your entire website using keywords. Since keywords hold such an important place in your web structure, make sure to use good primary and secondary keywords. Next, on a WordPress site, you need to create a post using rich images and main keywords. Including a table of contents and other visual aids is effective as well.

Next, you need to link all your relevant posts to each other to create specific blocks of content. So for example, if you have 3 posts on the topic of meditation, make sure to link all three to each other and then have a link to the parent page. Do this with all similar content. This creates a Silo structure and ensures that Google notices relevant information on your page.

Best Silo Plug-ins

Now that you know the basics of Silo, on to the main list of plug-ins you can use to create an effective Silo structure:

WPCashLinks LITE – This plugin allows you to link your keywords to affiliate websites, allowing users to simply click on a hyperlinked keyword which will lead them to the affiliate page. This helps you turn a profit on your post that is not completely related to traffic.

Related Posts for WordPress– This is one of the main plug-ins to use for Silo. It allows you to link related content on your website with a single click. All you need to do is show the plug-in which posts you want to link and it’ll do it for you.

Breadcrumb NXT – As the name suggests, this plugin allows you to create highly customisable breadcrumb trail on your WordPress page.

Custom Sidebars – This plugin allows you to create widgets on any of your posts and link them all to your parent web page.

Redirection – To reduce web page errors, this plugin allows you to redirect any of your specific blog posts to their Silo page that is the main category page. This helps improve your sites stature and reduces errors.

Yoast SEO – This is a powerful plugin for WordPress that allows you to create an effective Silo structure for your WordPress page. It allows you full control over your breadcrumbs and interlinking suggestions. The Redirect Manager present within this plugin keeps your site healthy and helps with redirection.

No Swear WP Internal Links Lite – Making Silo interlinks easier, this plugin links your pages to each other and to the parent site. It gives you full control over your Silo structure, making it extremely easy to manipulate and change as you wish.