Affiliate Marketing SEO: Silos

Thousands upon thousands of pages have been dedicated to affiliate marketing search engine optimization: why to do it, how to do it, how it's changing. Fortunately, you don't have to read thousands of thousands of pages to know what you need to know about affiliate marketing SEO.

Especially if you're a beginning to intermediate affiliate, it's best to master the key concepts behind affiliate marketing SEO before worrying about the minutiae. One of these key concepts, perhaps the most fundamental, is that you should "silo" the content on your website.

Silo your content properly, and the search engines can't help but love you.

The Organized Affiliate

We've written before about how organized affiliates--you use spreadsheets effectively, for instance--have a better chance at success. Siloing content is yet another vivid expression of this reality.

As most great things are, siloing content is a rather simple idea at heart. In order to create silos of content, all you have to do is choose 5-7 main keywords (do your research) related to your website topic, and then you use those as the categories or "silos" into which you will then start placing your content. Over time, you fill up each silo more and more, to the top.

For example, if you have a site about pet health, one of your silos might be "Cat Health," one might be "Dog Health," one might be "Reptile Health," and so forth.

Into each of these sections, then, you would create more specific "sub-pages" related to your main topic/keyword. You would, in essence, fill up your silo with more and more grain.

You may find that as your silos reach the top, your search engine rankings reach for the sky, too.

SEO Isn't Just About Search Engines, and Neither Are Silos

Over the past decade, trying to "game" the search engines by using super-tricky SEO tricks has proved to be a mistake. Sooner or later (these days it's most likely sooner), the search engines adjust their algorithms and SEO over-cleverness turns into SEO obsolescence.

"Link farms" and "keyword-stuffing" are two extinct SEO practices that used to work wonderfully.

Silos, by contrast, will never go the way of the dinosaur because silos are not just about pleasing the search engines, but also help your visitors find their way around your site. Siloing content enables your visitors to drill down ever deeper into subjects that interest them; and this of course may enable you to drill down ever deeper into your visitor's pocketbooks.

Organized affiliates are popular with both search engines and human visitors.

Silos Grow Your Authority

By placing more and more related pieces of content into your clearly-labeled silos, you can grow into a recognized authority on your topic. This process may take a while, especially if you're competing in a crowded niche, but if you just keep plugging at it, you can get there.

Very few affiliates are patient enough to build up well-stocked silos, so if you are one of them, you can enter the rarefied air of being recognized as an expert.

Once you are seen as an expert, your SEO value really takes off, particularly with respect to inbound links. People loooove to link to an expert; you're now the popular kid at school, and your popularity is feeding upon itself, growing and growing and becoming quite large.

Siloing content has both short-term and long-term benefits that every affiliate marketer must realize. Just make sure to silo your stuff early on in the life of your website, if at all possible, because once your grain is scattered all over the place, siloing can become a messy process.