Having a HARD time siloing a website

Right, so I have a small site (close to 100 articles) that in the beginning was not intended to be even this big. Now I would like to extend it up to 500 articles in the near future and it would only seem reasonable to develop a SILO structure for it.

Because of the niche of this website, I am really having a hard time organizing the articles to make a proper silo structure, so I was wondering if there is a keyword tool that would suggest you a category based on the keywords you enter? For example...if I had an article named "dog teeth care advice", it would suggest me an upper category like "dog teeth" or "dog health". For this topic the categories seem natural and obvious, but I am having a rough time organizing that website into proper silos.

Looking at similar websites didn't help much either. Most don't know about the silo structure, but those that do seem to have similar category issues as me.

Suggestions?

 

Does anybody have a clue what I'm talking about here?

 

Why would you want do siloing on your website in the first place? No one will keep reading article after article after article. People will get increasingly more annoyed having to read an article only to find out that it's not what they're looking for and having to read yet another article. They may do that once or twice, but they'll leave your website after that (probably never to return again). I think you're better off creating a decriptive title and description in combination with a funnel, i.e. a silo without the necessity to read the entire article, by:

1. selecting the most relevant keywords (tags) for each article;
2. referring to one or more related articles in the body of your article;
3. creating a small list of related articles, which you place at the bottom of your article.

I've been reading about siloing too, but haven't found many useful articles so far. Unfortunately, many of the articles about siloing are more related to PageRank sculpting than to theming. Perhaps you could share some of the resources on siloing that you've found? Here are some articles on this topic:

• Bruce Clay's classic article about siloing;
• Dan Thies' great follow-up about using nofollow for siloing;
• Expansion of Dan Thies' article with some evidence of the effect of siloing;
• Joost de Valk's article about PageRank sculpting through siloing.

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Thanks for your comments! (finally)

In the meantime I have somehow figured out the main categories (silos), but I am still relatively unhappy with what I came up with...

The best way to learn about SILO's is from the "inventor" at seo2020.com. It has some free information but you do have to purchase the ebook master plan though to get the full idea. Siloing the website is purely for SEO purposes and I don't intend to do the 100% correct silo as it would not fit my website theme (as you said, reading article after article doesn't make much sense. I will link to all the articles from a sub-category, but will include a link to the next article from current article too (like in a SILO)). The only thing I need is to give some boost to my website theme.

In master plan the author talks a lot about website bleeding and correct linking between silos and articles. He encourages you to avoid "theme bleeding", but his understanding of a theme is a little bit too strict for me. For example he says, not to link "dog health care advice" with "dog health food" because it would cause theme bleeding and cause lower rankings. He says only link "dog health care advice" with really close related terms such as "dog health care advice in UK", but this advice is just not practical in most cases. A simple look at wikipedia (that links all over broad niches) can prove that this is not such a big issue if it is an issue at all.

 

Here is another link that could be important to you. It's dated 2005, but the information there is very specific and should be correct even nowadays.

On topic analysis

"On-Topic Analysis is a procedure for identifying top, broader, narrower and optimum terms. These terms are then used to improve the semantics of themes, focused document, and keyword-driven marketing campaigns."

 

Cheers for the reference! I just read three more articles about siloing that I recommend you to read. Shimon Sandler's wrote an article about siloing content that is rather concise (too concise in my opinion), but he does give some useful practical tips so it makes a good read to start off with. Bruce Clay wrote another great article about how to optimise a website's structure by siloing. He explains the basics of theming well, but keeps it rather theoretical. The best article on this topic that I've come across is written by Lisa Barone. Her article is very good in explaining how to optimise the internal link structure when creating a themed website and includes some useful tips on how to properly interlink webpages.