A regular question that comes up in forums is what is the best site structure for SEO?

People that have been watching this site from the beginning will remember that the navigation used to link to every page in the site on every page (on the right and in the footer). At first the site was only 3 pages so it wasn’t a problem. But when 14thC grew to about 20 pages I got some complaints.

The navigation was getting cumbersome and distracting. It was also becoming a pain to manage. Thinking of new ways to display a lot of links across multiple categories and make them look good and be usable was getting difficult. The site was suffering in the name of SEO.

When I launched the SEO Interviews I also did a full site redesign. I knew the first round of interviews was going to be around 10. Trying to fit that into the existing structure just wasn’t going to happen. This was also the time I was going to officially add services and transition from an “informational” site to a “sales” site.

The solution I came up with is basically what’s in place now. I broke the site into sections: Core, Blog, Articles, Interviews and Press. The “core” pages are the foundation of the site including the home page, services, about, contact and site map. I added a landing page for each section. Finally, within each section I included only the navigation for that section along the left (though the core pages use the same sub-nav as the Articles).

This seemed like a logical transition to me to make the site more usable. I was surprised to find out this technique has a name: siloing.

Graywolf talked about siloing on his blog and listed some additional advantages beyond just usability including the ability to direct the viewer’s attention where you want (like at affiliate ads). His most recent post on this topic is here.
Another surprise to me was a strong SEO advantage for siloing. Siloing concentrates sections of your site to particular themes which can help you pick up more search referrals. Remember yesterday when I mentioned there was an additional factor at work with my increase in search traffic? This is it.

The search engines see clear breaks in content through the structure making sections of your site more “authoritative” on certain topics. You can concentrate your internal navigational links and their anchor text to the keywords and elements that are most important to you.

With the new site update I am going to further restrict the navigation. With 26 articles things are getting out of hand again. I haven’t quite decided what approach I am going to use yet but be sure I’ll be watching the results closely.

If you have a small, new site and you want to make sure every page gets indexed use your navigation to link to every page in the site. When you grow out of that and it just gets too cumbersome or if you want to emphasize certain sections of your site or guide viewers to specific pages try siloing — it worked for me!

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