Any one heard of these terms? I heard about them recently off one of my friends who is a bit clueless and vague in general. He seemed to think that it was something to do with a whole new way of creating a site so that it is optimised. Apparently It also has something to do with the way google works to provide the most relevant results for its keyword searches. If any one has any clues as to what the hell it is, and give me some clues on where to find out more about it, I would be very interested to know. Thanks
I think your friend is attempting to act like he knows what he's talking about Themes would be just a different style or design of a specific platform or script used on\as a website.
Precisely, this is just SEO jargon created by people who don't know what the hell they're talking about or trying to make themselves sound more knowledgable than they really are. Besides, what these junk words talk about fall under information architecture (structuring a site, and the topic of a site, respectively), not Search Engine Optimization.
Although silo is a web design word bit I think silo and theme are related to SEO. Silo seems a strange word but the concept is very easy. Silo means you design you site in a way that you categorize your site into sub-niches and your main keyword (niche) is your theme. For example "Golf" is your "theme" or main niche and followings are your "silo" or sub-niche: Golf Instruction Golf Clubs Golf Balls Golf Shoes Golf News Golf Courses and in each silo you will put your articles, so your page will look like this: http://www.yourdomain.com/golf-clubs/callaway-golf-club.html Code (markup): The main purpose of Silo structure is to correctly make your internal linking in order to make it easy for search engine bots to crawl your site and here is when SEO gets into consideration. You need to link each article within a silo to next article, and your silo links are appear as main navigation menu on every page. Hope this helps you.
As I said earlier, it is not a Web design word. The technique comes from information architecture, which has its roots in the off-line world, not the Web (it has, however, successfuly adapted to the Internet). And to be honest, there's no point in making up words for things that already exist - in this case the categorization of a site's contents (I'm sure Dewey turns over in his grave - as are many deceased librarians - every time an SEO consultant uses the words "theme" and "silo" to tak about the structuring and categorization of information). That's a gross oversimplification that doesn't really identify anything. Yes, I was able to determine that golf is the primary topic of your hypothetical examle site, but in what capacity is this information being presented? Is it a golf course site, is it a site for golf enthusiasts, or is it a golf supply manufacturer that also happens to be affiliated with a few golf courses and wants to ensure that people know how to properly use the products they manufacture? (Once you've identified that, then will you be able to go into far greater detail and specifically categorize what order everything goes in). Which makes absolutely no sense whatsoever from an information architecture point of view (outside of the menu, which is such an OBVIOUS given that it shouldn't even have to come up in SEO circles). The only time you link one page to the next (and the one before it) sequentially is when you have a multi-page article that has been presented on multiple pages online (though for usabililty reasons there should be an option to read the entire article as a single page - then you'd pick one to block from the search engines to avoid any duplicate content issues while leaving the other open; typically that would be the "alternate" version that gets blocked - such as presenting the article as a series of pages, and then offering a "single page" version that has noindex, nofollow on the page's META tag). As for linking to other pages that are part of the same site but do not appear sequentially, (what I am about to say is not a hard and fast rule, but more of a "best practice" than anything) you want to generally link to the page the first time the targeted keywords appear in that particular page's content (as in the stuff people read - the main content area), or later on in the page if there has been sufficient space between the two instances. And the key here is to do this for the benefit of the people reading the page, not the search engines. They'll benefit as well, and that's where you'll be rewarded in their listings.
NickE83 asked about silo and theme and I tried to explain what that is mean in internet and seo world, otherwise they might have other meaning in other places. To be frank, before hearing these two words, I knew I should categorize the site specially for visitors rather than search engines. As you said, it is just a hypothetical example site, a site can be about any subject and yet you can categorize them, it depends on site owner. In our example, the main topic of site can be "golf club" and golf clubs of different cities of a state can be silos. Is there any rule that we can not link one article to another unless it is a multi-page article? Since articles of one silo (category) are related it makes sense from SEO as well as visitor point of view to link one article to the next one. Even it makes sense to link to an article which is in another silo if they are related.
My reply to your post was written with Nick in mind (as well as others who come along and read this in the future). I apologize if I offended you. Not only that, but a lot of the concepts used by SEO consultants actually come from other areas, especially copywriting, information architecture and front-end Web development. My reply to that part of your post was a mental exercise for the OP. But I really can't stand the words "silos" and "themes" when it comes to SEO and try to educate people as to what they really mean whenever they crop up. As I said, it's a general best practice not to sequentially link pages together unless it's a multi-page article or a menu. As for interlinking pages, that's best done for the benefit of the user (though it doesn't hurt us to lace those links with keyword rich anchor text when appropriate). For example, if I'm working on a client site about astronomy (let's suppose the current page I'm working on is about novas and supernovae - and the massive stars that create them) and I find an opportunity to link to another article on the same site about the Crab Nebula or Eta Carinae (better hope that star doesn't blow up anytime soon), I'll do it. Not only would those be relevant and useful to the user (not to mention related to each other), but by including the keywords in my anchor text I'll be able to give those pages a boost when people search for those particular keywords. Now if it was a page about wolves on the other hand (as in the species, Canis Lupus, I wouldn't want to link to an article about the Chicago Wolves hockey team - in fact, I'd do everything in my power to get that page about the hockey team removed from the site since it obviously doesn't belong.