Silo site structure is not new. It has been around for years and there are  many SEO gurus who advocate this approach to building websites. The question is  does it work for Wordpress? This post explains what a silo site structure is,  how you can set one up with Wordpress and also my own experience building a  Wordpress Silo.

The basic concept behind a silo is to have a hierarchy of pages. Each page should have good quality unique content. So for  example a simplified  (and very much made up) silo site structure would be as  follows:

Web Design

• Web Design Tutorials
• Web Design Tutorials For Beginners
• Web design Tutorials For Wordpress
• Web Design Tutorials For Advanced Users

Web Design Resources

• Web Design Resources For Beginners
• Web Design Resources For Wordpress

Web Design Tools

• Web Design Tools For Beginners
• Web Design Tools For Wordpress
• Web Design Tools For Advanced Users

The main targetted keyword is <strong>Web Design.</strong> At the next level  this keyword is extened to be more specific and then again at the lowest level.  The reason for doing this is that the site owner is keen to eventually get  traffic for the more general keyword - Web Design. And the site is said to be  themed around Web Design.

An additional benefit of the silo approach is that it promotes good web usability by having a simple user navigation structure. My first introduction to Silo Site structure was via  an ebook by Charles Heflin called the Master Plan. This was an excellent read  and I decided to put the idea into practice on a Wordpress Blog.

I did a search of the internet and found a Wordpress plug-in that allows you  to create a silo structure with Wordpress pages. The author of the plugin  recommended that pages are created and then promoted via blog posts. This seemed  to be the best of both worlds.

Over a period of six months I created pages and posts in the recommended silo  way. I deliberately did not do very much off-site linking - just enough to get  basic visibility of the blog. The reason for this was to test the silo  enthuasiasts hypothesis that by just using a silo strucutre you will get better  ranking and traffic.

In total I produced 12 pages of good quality content similar to the above  structure plus the home page. 13 in all - was this an omen of things to come?   Each page was also announced with a blog post making the site 25 pages in all.

Ok, here are the results of the siloing jury: the site did not receive  any significant ranking or traffic. The keywords I targetted were not highly  competitive so I would have expected some ranking and traffic. The average  daily unique visitors from Google was 4 visits.

So was this a failed experiment? Not really, <strong>what it shows is that  siloing by itself was not enough to drive reasonable rankings and  traffic</strong>. My current thinking on siloing is that it is a good way to structure your  site for visitors, but in itself it is not enough to get you high rankings and  visitors. So if you are tempted to use a silo approach you need to also have a  good linking approach as well. In this little experiment siloing was not enough  by itself to get higher rankings.

If you are thinging of siloing your blog or website and you need great content then a really good way to do this is to write articles the are useful for your readers. Easy to say but not always easy to follow through with. However there is a great new tool that provides article templates and even an article rewriter that can help you to produce articles for you blog really quick. It’s called Article Boxer.