Siloing is a way of organizing a Web site into a collection of smaller sections that each focus on a single topic or just a handful of topics. Adopting this departmentalized structure can give you a significant boost in the search engines as it helps to ensure that keyword focus is not diluted. In addition to departmentalizing areas of your site good siloing techniques will encourage you to put the pages for each section into different folders and change the navigation menus for each department to reflect the different pages within the department.

Siloing is not an underhand or blackhat technique and no search engine will penalize you for using siloing. Indeed, almost every major content site on the web is siloed in some way or another so this is a professional technique that is worth adopting and not a sneaky one that you're only using to give your site a boost in the search engines. In the right hands, siloing is an incredibly powerful tool. Unfortunately, it can be very time consuming and complex to create a well siloed site using conventional web development tools, but with XSitePro it is as simple as answering a few questions and clicking the OK button. The software does all the hard work for you. However, before you whiz off and start siloing all your sites do read the rest of this chapter as it contains a lot of useful information that will help you to create a well siloed site in record time.

Also remember that not all sites are suitable for siloing. If your site is just a handful of pages then it's highly unlikely that siloing will help your site in any way.

What's the difference between Virtual Siloing and Directory Siloing?

There are two major types of silo structure; virtual and folder or directory silos.

Virtual silos leave all the pages in their current location on the web server, but create an inter-linking structure that links pages on a similar theme together. So, for example, all your pages would be in the root directory of your Web site and when someone clicks on a link to go to another page that second page will also be in the root directory. Folder or directory silos use the same inter-linking strategy as virtual silos, but take it a step further by putting pages on the same theme in an appropriately named folder or directory.

So all the sports car pages might be found in a folder called:

• www.mydomain.com/cars/sport-cars

and all the pages relating to compact cars will be in a folder named:

• www.mydomain.com/cars/compact

Unless you have a good reason for going with virtual silos (e.g. it's not possible to create folders on your web space) it is usually preferable to go with proper directory siloing.

How to set up Siloing in XSitePro

To make an existing XSitePro site into a siloed XSitePro site you need to have already created the site, and the site needs to have at least one page that has Subpages. If you are not familiar with how to create sub-pages please see the appropriate section in the Essentials User Guide.

Open the site you wish to silo by selecting it on the Project Selection Tree.

Select the Siloing button on the Other tab.

• On the tab labeled Step 1: Confirm, make sure that you have selected Yes under where it asks the question Do you want to switch on siloing for this site?
• On the tab labeled Step 2: Type, you need to select whether you want to use a directory silo or virtual silo. Usually you will choose Directory siloing as this tends to be the most effective.
• On the tab labeled Step 3: Files, you need to select the parent pages and sub-pages that you want to silo.
• On the tab labeled Step 4: Options, you can select what naming convention you want to use for any folders that are created. You have two choice; the File Name or the Menu Text. Both of these are taken directly from the Page Settings tab.
• On the tab labeled Step 5: Menus, you can select what menus you want to appear on your siloed pages and exactly what links will appear. This is an incredibly powerful feature and it's worth getting right as it can greatly increase usability of your site and give you a helping hand in the search engines. It can help keep the focus completely on that specific silo section rather than having links to lots of things that are only partly related to the current silo section. First you need to select whether your silo navigation is going to replace the current left or the right hand navigation. If you are not currently using left or right hand navigation on the site you will need to enable this by checking the Include Links on Left Panel checkbox on the Page Layout tab (or for the right panel if you want your navigation to appear there):
  Also on the Step 5: Menus I tab, you can choose which of your other standard navigation menus you want to remain on the siloed pages. For example if you have a Page Footer menu with links to your Privacy Policy and Contact Us details you might want to leave that on. Usually, it is best to keep any other navigation menus to a minimum on siloed pages, as then all of the emphasis is focused on the silo menus that will replace the normal left or right navigation menus.
• On the sixth tab labeled Step 6: Menus II you select the wording that will be used when link back to the previous page. For example if you were on the String Instruments page and you clicked on a link to view a page on Guitars (i.e. a sub-page of String Instruments) you would see a link in the navigation menu of the Guitars page that allowed you to return to the String Instruments Page.
  • Back: The link on the silo navigation will simply say 'Back' and clicking on that link would return the user to the previous page.
  • Up One Level: The link on the silo navigation will simply say 'Up One Level' and clicking on that link would return the user to the previous page.
  • Parent Page Filename: Instead of 'Back' or 'Up One Level' users would see a link with the same name as the filename, but without the extension and hyphenation (e.g. String-Instruments.html would become String Instruments).
  • Parent Page Menu Text: Instead of 'Back' or 'Up One Level' users would see a link with the same name as the Page Menu Text that was entered on the Page Settings tab:
• On the tab labeled Step 7: Menus III you specify what other links will appear on the silo navigation menu. You can choose to have no links at all, other than a back-link to the parent page or you can have links to all of the other pages at that level. For example if your site structure looked as follows:
  • String Instruments
  • Brass
  • Percussion
  • Keyboard
  • Organ
  • Piano
  • Harpsichord

When you were on the Organ page you would see a link to go back to the Keyboard page and below that there would be links Piano and Harpsichord. If you were on the Keyboard page there would be links to String Instruments, Brass, Percussion and Keyboard, but you would not see links to Organ, Piano and Harpsichord. This kind of focused navigation system helps to indicate to search engines what your site, or what a particular section of a site, is about. Imagine how it looks from the search engines point of view. If you have a navigation menu that has links to the following on a search engine such as Google it is likely to assume that your site is primarily to do with keyboard instruments as the majority of the links are relating to that.

• String Instruments
• Brass Instruments
• Percussion Instruments
• Keyboard Instruments
• Organ
• Piano
• Grand Piano
• Harpsichord
• Electric Organ
• Church Organ
• Hammond Organ
• Classical Piano
• Honky Tonk Piano
• Baby Grand Piano

Whereas, if you limited the links so that you just had links at the same level your site wouldn't be focused on keyboard instruments, but instruments in general. There's a big difference.

• String Instruments
• Brass Instruments
• Percussion Instruments
• Keyboard Instruments

Also, by not including String Instruments, Brass Instruments and Percussion Instruments when listing the Keyboard Instruments would mean that all of the emphasis was being put on keyboard and it wasn’t being diluted by things that had nothing to do with the subject of keyboard instruments (i.e. String, Brass and Percussion Instruments)

On the tab labeled Step 8: Silo Site Maps, you have complete control over how the siloing feature of XSitePro handles site maps. This is incredibly powerful as it allows you to automatically create individual site maps for each of your siloed sections. To do this by hand could take days, but with XSitePro all you need to do is click a few check-boxes and let the software do the rest. The first question you need to answer is "Would you like XSitePro to automatically generate silo site maps for each of the siloed sections of your site?" If you'd prefer to just have the normal site maps that XSitePro creates then select No or select Yes to have individual site maps for each of your siloed sections. Next you need to specify how you want to display the title for each of the pages on your site map. The choices are to use the page filename menus the extension (i.e. New-York-Yankees.html would become New York Yankees), the page Menu Text as specified on the Page Settings tab, or the Page Title as specified on the Page Settings tab. Finally, you need to specify what description you want to appear for each of the pages listed.

The choices are... The page description exactly as it appears on the Page Settings tab, the first 250 words taken directly from Description on the Page Settings tab, or you can have no description at all by selecting the "I don't want a description to appear' radio button.

Once you've made your selections just click on the Finish button and that's it. Your site will now be siloed the next time you publish or preview it.

Don't forget to check your work

Siloing a site is an involved process and one that shouldn't be rushed through. The first time you silo a site using XSitePro it will take some trial and error to get all of the settings just right, but once you've mastered it you'l be able to silo your sites in just a few minutes. After following the steps above make sure to preview your site to make sure that it looks how you expect it to look. Check that the menus that are appearing on the siloed pages are how you want them to appear and that pages are being published to the folders according to how you have set it up. For example, if you specified on Step 4: Options that you wanted to have the folders named after the link text you'll be able to see it in the url when you preview or publish.

When previewing, you will see the directories created as per your silo settings:

Similarly, when published, this directory structure will be retained: