As an SEO (search engine optimization) and PPC (pay per click) management company, I’ve just about heard it all when I am talking to “potential clients”. Every excuse under the sun… well… almost all of them. We had an interesting situation come up that I am going to tell you a little about. I’d love to get some thoughts on this…

A company that builds custom metal doors and gates for “high end” homes was wondering and asking “Why would I need SEO and would it actually be beneficial to me?” He even mentioned that he has seen a little slow down in his particular area(s). He said that if we could come up with some research and legitimate answers, he would sign up. The challenge was on. In looking around for some great information (and in a nutshell), here’s what we discovered: The housing market in his area had actually not decreased or recessed near as much as he thought. Statistical numbers actually showed that his market had remained almost level as a whole. In fact, money spent on “higher end” housing was even up a little bit (surprising I know).

So why was his business down?

Here is the conclusion. Many people are STILL spending money. Even though he has a very niche industry and market there is no reason why he would be down. His website was not ranking very well…anywhere. His competitors websites were. There is a rule of thumb to remember: if you are not being found in the search engines easily for your keywords, some one else is. The trend for money spending has slightly changed, and I believe that’s what he was noticing. People are nervous, and are not as careless with their money spending habits as they once were. All the data seems to be showing that people are spending more time trying to learn about products/services [now] more than before where they were being more hasty to spend money.

Where are they looking? Online.

Basically we were able to show that with better positioning in the search engines, he would be able to appeal to more people who are “looking” for HIS service/product.

This is how we can do it —-> Search Engine Optimization <—-

A lot of times, a page may not rank well for specific keywords because the link structure between pages isn’t really a “structure” but more of a diluted spider web of links. Siloing is a structural solution to this problem. Siloing is a way to group pages that belong to a central theme. There are two types of siloing, directory-based and virtual siloing. This entry focuses on virtual siloing.

The term “siloing” comes from an analogy involving grain silos you see in the mid-west. If you’ve ever traveled through that area, you’ll know that there are points where you see miles of practically nothing and then out of nowhere, a grain silo appears. The analogy comes from the fact that if you use this “siloing” technique that I’m about to mention, it will make your page stand out to the search engines much like a grain silo stands out to a driver.

A virtual silo is a linking strategy. The “silo” is the thematic center point of your structure. You will need to have supporting pages that link underneath this hub. These are the pages that are thematically similar to each other but are sub-themes of the silo. You also want to link horizontally between these support pages to build up page rank among them in order to transfer more to your central page. In a sense, you’re performing the third-level push mentioned in the Advanced Page Rank Manipulation Techniques Part I blog but also including a central page into the picture. The whole idea with siloing is to create a disproportionate amount of links to important pages in order to make them seem more relevant to the search engines. Siloing is a beneficial technique for boosting page rank but if not done properly, it can really mess your SEOing efforts up, so use this procedure with caution.

Third Level Push

Websites are typically made up of levels or tiers. The first level is the home page itself. The second level includes your main categories. The third level opens those categories into products, information, etc, and so on. Because second tier pages end up on global navigation bars, this causes those pages to gain a lot of page rank at the expense of 3^rd level pages. The third level push essentially takes some of that 2^nd tier page rank and pushes it down to 3^rd tier pages. To accomplish this task you simply just need to add a “nofollow” attribute to all links on the 2nd tier that point to other 2^nd tier pages. Not too difficult really.

From a spider’s perspective your global navigation is different on the 2^nd tier. The result of all of this is that you get more traffic on your 3^rd tier pages, which are typically your product pages and that means more sales! This technique can get more complicated though. You can get even more ambitious and do the same for your 3^rd tier links but link back to the home page, not the 2^nd tier pages. You can be even more aggressive by nofollow-ing links back to the home page on the 2^nd and 3^rd tier.

Getting into the more advanced side of this technique can be risky if you don’t know what you’re doing. Try it at your own risk and only if it makes sense.