Traditionally, search engine optimization is often approached as a post production task, taking the existing components of a website and improving them to increase rankings. Often times the work is outsourced or handled by companies that don’t have a working relationship with a site’s design or development team. However, savvy webmasters and successful SEOs understand that a websites architecture and overall linking structure will have a huge impact on your website and your business bottom line. Fortunately, Drupal’s core architecture makes it easy build a site with solid linking structure.

Consider this, building a house does not only consist of throwing up some walls, adding a roof, slapping on some paint and expecting it to stay standing when the first storm blows through. Instead, it requires strategic zoning and planning, blueprint designs, excavation, laying a foundation and a sleuth of other steps that most people never see before the first stud is nailed into place. All these factors are essential to ensure that a house will remain standing. The same principles hold true for building a successful website.

When you build your website on a solid foundation of vertical market theme research, solid linking structure otherwise known as ‘silo website architecture’ and quality content that provides value to your visitors, you will be miles ahead of the SEO game even before you begin acquiring back links.

Website Silo Architecture

A silo is simply another word for ‘category’. Silo website architecture is a way of organizing your content into tightly structured themes whereas the content of each page, including body copy, titles, headers, and urls, all work together to support the overall theme of the silo. Furthermore, each page within a silo links to each other to reinforce the theme. Cross-linking between silos should point to a silo landing page whenever your content contains a keyword phrase that supports that silo’s theme. It is easy to create a silo structured website using Drupal with a handful of basic modules.

Why is this important?

By structuring your website this way, you are telling the search engines exactly what your site is about while providing a logical navigation for your visitors. Google’s algorithm pays close attention to the keywords in the anchor text of a link, especially when it is contained within the body content of a web page, and places high importance to the page the link is pointing to. Internal links contained within your website can carry as much weight as inbound links from external sites. When you take the time to plan your site and are mindful of the way it is structured, you will be able to rank higher with less effort. On the other hand, haphazard cross-linking will ‘bleed your theme’ and weaken the overall strength of your individual silos.

When you combine this with Latent Semantic Indexing based on vertical market theme research, this becomes extremely powerful.

To quote Russell Wright from Themezoom: “Latent Semantic Indexing defines a web-page not merely by its “keyword density”, but also by related keywords on other website pages having a similar topic or theme. Because LSI technology no longer needs keyword density as a primary factor, you may discover websites ranked very high for keyword terms that are not even appearing on the page!”
This is essentially what I am seeing happening with the example site I stated earlier. Many of the keyword phrases that I am ranking for do not appear on my site.

Themes Vs. Keywords

The intricacies of theme research and LSI as beyond the scope of this presentation. But to give you a basic tip for uncovering search engine proven synonyms that are worthy of considering both in your content and silo directory structure, you can add the tilde symbol in front of your keywords when you search in Google. Pay close attention to the bolded terms. It is currently not an exact science, but this is the direction that search algorithms are heading.

There are several different modules that I use to achieve a silo structure in Drupal depending on the type of site I am working on. The following examples will cover how to do this for the basic article/content site along with advanced strategies for e-commerce, photo galleries or sites that use custom nodes.