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.

For those of you out there that like to stay up-to-date on current SEO practices, I know of a few websites you might be interested in.  There are literally thousands of websites out there that claim authority on the subject, but I’ve found that most of them just repeat what they’ve heard, regardless if whether they know their advice to be true.  That being the case, I’ve narrowed my selection down to a few good sites that I recommend everyone in the SEO community read for reliable, up-to-date information on the latest and greatest in the wide world of Search Engine Optimization.  They include:

1. SEOBook Blog
2. SEOmoz Blog
3. Bluce Clay Blog
4. Search Engine Journal
5. Search Engine Watch
6. Search Engine Land
7. Matt Cutt’s Blog
8. Netmark Essentials’ Blog

We don’t use gimmicks or unscrupulous search engine spam techniques that could get your site removed and “blacklisted” from search engines. Instead we perform legitimate optimized writing and programming that meets search engine rules and makes for top search engine positioning that lasts and continues to perform well for months and, in many cases, years.
Here are some of the questions we believe you need to ask before hiring a SEO company:
•    Find out how long the SEO company has been in business (in the SEO world 3-4 years old is very old)
•    Does the SEO firm or its principals have marketing experience background?
•    Will they perform an analysis of your competition’s websites to understand why the other sites rank highly?
•    What will the SEO company base their keyword recommendations on? Keyword research is a necessity to determine relevant, targeted keywords in order for a SEO campaign to succeed.
•    What are realistic traffic expectations for your site? Obscure keyword phrases may bring top ten or #1 ranking positions but if only a trickle of people search for the term each month, it likely won’t result in increased sales.
•    Does the SEO company differentiate between “traffic” and “qualified traffic”? Bulk unqualified traffic arriving at your site for irrelevant keywords is unlikely to convert to a sale or new customer. Does the SEO firm understand what it takes to create a sales conversion? More than likely, you as a business owner knows!
•    Does the SEO company fully comply to search engine’s posted best practices and a strict no-spam policy to avoid your website being penalized, possibly indefinitely, by search engines?
•    What methods will the SEO company use to increase traffic? Will they make changes to your existing web page coding or will they just be adding or revising meta tags? Will they be performing search engine optimization copywriting and editing to add relevant keywords to your visible page text? Will they be adding new pages, or possibly redesigning your navigation to make it more search engine friendly?  Do they recommend an entire redesign when it is not necessary?
•    Does the SEO company use Latent Semantic Analysis for proper keyword placement?  Do they know the proper keyword density needed?
•    Is what the company does standard for everyone, or are certain techniques used for your specific needs? (Keep in mind that the same shoe does not fit all companies feet, so to speak)
•    How many pages will they be optimizing in your website?
•    How many people actually work at the firm? 90% of SEO firms have 4 people or under.  Are they going to have the resources, time, and man power for your campaign?
•    How much, if any, of their strategy relies on pay-per-click advertising and how much will that cost? Remember, pay-per-click is like leasing vs. buying a car. When you stop paying, the traffic stops. We sometimes recommend pay-per-click advertising for specific marketing strategies, but not for ongoing search engine visibility. Pay-per-click is not a long-term solution unless you have deep pockets. Obtaining “free” search engine positions in natural search engines, such as Google, is the preferred - and longer-term - route to more qualified traffic.
•    If the SEO company is offering high ranking guarantees - how is that possible when no-one can control or influence the search sites? Even Google’s own published guidelines states: “No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google. Beware of SEO’s that claim to guarantee rankings, or that claim a “special relationship” with Google, or that claim to have a “priority submit” to Google. There is no priority submit for Google.”
•    How will your website traffic be monitored and measured? What type of reports will you get and how often will you receive them?
If you can feel good about all of the answers to these questions about your SEO firm, you have probably made a good decision.  Why wouldn’t you hire an SEO firm that is willing to go the extra mile to follow strict standards to make sure you see success?

A 301 canonical redirect is a way to get all of the web pages on a site to point to a certain address. For instance, if you wanted all of your non www-prefix pages going to pages with a www prefix, you would use a 301 canonical redirect.  A more concrete example would be taking the page http://something.com and redirecting it to http://www.something.com. This is the 301 redirect part. Canonicalization allows all pages to point to other sites. For instance, a 301 canonical redirect could point all pages with the format http://something.com/morestuff to http://www.something.com/morestuff.

So why would anyone want to do this? From an SEO perspective, this is a very important optimization technique. Search engines don’t look at non-www prefix websites and their corresponding www-prefix sites as the same. If people place links to each of these URLs then you are in essence building a link campaign for different URLs. 301 redirects centralize these pages and allow all link juice to go to a central page.

There are various techniques to achieving a 301 redirect depending on the type of website or the server the website is on. If the website is hosted on an Apache server, one needs to access a file called .htaccess and modify with the following code:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.example\.com$
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L]

In most cases this will work. It will not work on a website hosted on an IIS (Microsoft) server, however. If this is the case, one can add the following javascript code to the global header or footer to achieve the same effect:

<script type=”text/javascript”>
var pathd=”http://www.moorenonprofitlaw.org”+location.pathname+location.search;
if (location.hostname.substring(0,3) != ‘www’)
window.location.href=pathd;

But be forewarned. Some search engines such as Google do not understand Javascript and will therefore  not help you with you SEO efforts. According to Google Webmaster Help:

“When a redirect link is embedded in Javascript, the search engine indexes the original page rather than following the link, whereas users are taken to the redirect target. Like cloaking, this practice is deceptive because it displays different content to users and to Googlebot…”

If you page is an ASP page, you can use the following redirect code:
<%
If InStr(Request.ServerVariables(”SERVER_NAME”),”www”) = 0 Then
Response.Status=”301 Moved Permanently”
Response.AddHeader “Location”,”http://www.”& Request.ServerVariables(”HTTP_HOST”) & Request.ServerVariables(”REQUEST_URI”)
Response.End
End if
%>

Or the following if it is an ASP.NET page (I’ve found that the redirect only works if interested right after an <html> tag):

<script runat=”server”>
protected void Application_BeginRequest(Object sender, EventArgs e)
{
HttpApplication app = sender as HttpApplication;
string domainName = “example.com”;

if (app != null)
{
string host = app.Request.Url.Host.ToLower();
string requestUrl = app.Request.Url.PathAndQuery;

if (String.Equals(host, domainName))
{
Uri newURL = new Uri(app.Request.Url.Scheme +
“://www.” +
domainName +
requestUrl);

app.Context.Response.RedirectLocation = newURL.ToString();
app.Context.Response.StatusCode = 301;
app.Context.Response.End();
}
}
}
</script>

If you want to add code to a .php file, the following should work:
<?php

if (substr($_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'],0,3) != ‘www’) {
header(’HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently’);
header(’Location: http://www.’.$_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'.$_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']);

}
?>

There are several different ways to achieve the 301 canonical redirect and sometimes it takes some code tweaking to get it to work properly, but this is a start.