Organising your data
By now you should have a lot of data collected from the first two parts of this guide. Its a great idea to get all of this information well organised before you start building your website.
I think there might be tools for organising this sort of information but I always come back to the simple text files and excel files.
A good tip here is to use a service such as Dropbox in conjunction with flat file storage so taht all of your data is a) always backed up and b) accessible from wherever you are.
I typically have a folder for my website and then inside that folder have some text files detailing domain information, login details, notes on the competition and then a spreadsheet with the keywords and the proposed site structure.
The above is an example of the intended site structure and it uses the same example of coffee machines niche - I have listed the keyword and then the search volume next to it. I have also laid the terms out in order of relevance to each other and this is basically what forms our silo structure.
This structure is useful for several reasons -
1.It makes the site easy to navigate and relevant to the user - for example if someone lands on the page "filter coffee machines" then they will quite probably be interested in the two sub articles -
filter coffee machines with steamer and filter coffee machines for your home - so the structure is adding value for the reader.
2.It adds re-enforces the relevance of each page because you are doing exactly what you would do when you build offsite backlinks - you are linking from a page that is about a particular topic, to another page that is about the same or similar topic so just like a contextual backlink about coffee is going to be valuable for your site so will a contextual backlink on your own site about filter coffee machines be valuable for your page about filter coffee machines for your home.
3.Aside from the relevance between pages, a good site structure means that when you build backlinks to your site - to your homepage for example - the "link juice" will flow throughout your site effectively.
Interestingly Google talk about this a little bit on their adwords platforms and they advise that adwords is laid out inline with the structure of your website and they also talk about having that structure in an order similar to a silo structure - this is just a random observation but it reafirms the importance of a silo structure.
Building your website
I wasn't going to go into detail about the physical building of the website but I guess I might as well seeing as its relevant.
So the first thing you would need if you dont already have it is a website host - this may or may not be the same as your domain registrar but personally I would recommend keeping them seperate - IF your host ever goes down for any reason then its much easier to repoint your DNS from your registrar than it is to have to transfer your entire domain.
For registrars I recommend Godaddy - in my opinion they are the best - fast, cheap and reliable.
For hosting I recommend any of these comanies (All of which I have had great experience with):
Host-stage
powerup hosting
siteground
hostgator
tsohost
nimbus hosting
a2 hosting
I beleive that all of these providers offer backups of some description and I would highly recommend that you avail of that backup service whichever provider you choose - there are loads of things that can happen to your site that will cause it to fail and having a backup in place when that happens will save you so much stress, time and money.
Once you have set up your hosting then just change your domains nameservers to those specified by your hosting provider.
Nameserver changes are always advertised as taking 24-48 hours but in reality should propogate within a few hours. You can check that your nameservers have updated here:
http://mxtoolbox.com/dnscheck.aspx
And you can check specifically that your domains IP address has updated across the globe here:
https://www.whatsmydns.net/
Installing wordpress
The next step is to install wordpress. Once again, i think that all of the providers above come with CPANEL and also offer "one click installation" of wordpress. if that is the case all you need to do is log in to your cpanel account and look for softilicious / one click installer / wordpress and follow the instructions. The only thing to look out for is that the installer is putting it in the root of your domain - sometimes by default the installer will have a sub-directory such as "wp" already listed just remove that and leave the sub directory empty.
Disclaimer: @Ste Fishkin the MS paint art is for you
Manual Install
Just in case anyone out there needs to do a manual installation of Wordpress - this might be the case if you have a hosting provider that doesnt use cpanel for example. Here is the guide (Via FTP, if you have Shell access its even easier but I wont go into that):
Set up an sql database - if you have cpanel but dont have access to auto installer then you can log in to cpanel and use the Mysql database wizard. If you use another provider just ask them for instructions on setting up a mysql database.
download wordpress from here -
http://wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz
Extract it using 7z or other compression software and then upload it to the root of your website hosting - you want everything inside of the wordpress folder, so your website root should have the wp-content folder, wp-admin folder etc and not a wordpress folder.
Once you have the files uploaded simply browse to your website and you will be prompted with the wordpress install wizard where you can enter your mysql database details and follow the remaining prompts to create your wordpress install.
Configuring wordpress
Once you have installed wordpress you can visit the admin area by browsing to yoursite.com/wp-admin and logging in with the credentials provided to you during the installation.
The first thing I do is remove any default content - this is normally a sample page and a few sample posts.
Configuring your theme
the next thing is to add a theme. If you brose to appearance / themes then you can find plenty of decent (and free) themes available. These will definitely do, but if you have the budget I would recommend a premium theme and the best place for those, in my opinion, is theme forest.
Once you have your theme installed you want some plugins as well, as follows:
contact form 7 - for creating your contact forms
wordfence security - for keeping hackers away
W3 total cache - to keep your site running fast
WP social sharing
Yoast SEO
visual composer - when looking at themes I would always advise that you look for ones that have visual composer included with them because it makes designing a visually appealing site effortless.
Configuring permalinks
You want nice URLs for your pages and posts - this is very important with your silo structure and with SEO in general because it means you can easily have your keywords appearing in your URLs.
Check in settings / permalinks and make sure you have the option "post name" ticked.
Setting up your SILO structure
There are lots of ways of doing this, and there are plugins that will do it for you, but this is the way I do it - it involves some manual labour but it also keeps everything looking natural and not too regimented.
I have a page targeting each keyword in my list and I structure those pages according to my site layout - for example:
coffee machines - this is my homepage
pod coffee machines - this page is a sub page of coffee machines
the top 5 pod coffee machines - this is a sub page of pod coffee machines
On the homepage I will link out to all of the second level pages.
On the second level pages I will link out to all of the third level pages.
and so on.
YOu can do this from the sidebar in this format:
Back to [previous page in hierachy]
Further information:
sub page 1
sub page 2
sub page 3
This way you end up with a structure that matches exactly the site plan we created previously, further more we have each topic linking directly to and from nested (and related) topics and we don't have any links between unrelated topics - this is the simplest form of silo structure and it keeps all the links on the site very relevant to each other and allows link juice to filter down accordingly.
Cross linking between silos
To further enhance this structure you can also cross link between pages that are on the same level in the structure and relevent to each other.
You can do this systematically by linking to the previous page and the next page in the same level of the silo structure; for example as per the site layout that I listed above filter coffee machines with steamer could also link to filter coffee machines for your home because they are on the same level - I would add these links again in the sidebar and under the heading related content. This makes more sense if you have 5 pages in your third level and each page links to its "neighbours".
You can also do it randomly and on each page just have two links out to the most related pages on the same level and in teh same branch of your structure.
Further more, you can link to these related pages and the child pages from within the content of the page - for example, on the filter coffee machines page you might talk about coffee machines with steamers within the content of that page - this would be the ideal opportunity to link to your filter coffee machines with steamer page.
Specifically how to set this up
I create all of my content as pages, I keep a very basic site menu that has just homepage, about us, contact pages and so on, and then I use a page template that has a sidebar built in that I can use on each page to link to the parent, the sub-pages and the select related content.
What you should end up with is a structure where you are forced to browse down through topics that gradually go into more specific detail about the exact same subject OR browse across to very closely related subjects.
How to automate this
Rather than setting this up manually you can automate most of it by using the built in sidebar system that comes with wordpress and some plugins and/or custom code.
There is a good guide here about setting up some code in your sidebars that will automatically show the immediate parent as well as all of the children for any particular page -
https://wordpress.org/support/topic/display-sub-pages-sub-page-parent-in-sidebar
Building out your website
At this point you have your plan, you have the site build and you have your silo structure designed. The next stage is to start putting your content together and posting it on your site - stay tuned for the next guide showing you the best way to do this as well as some tips on how to make your content successful and to maximise its impact on the community around your niche.
Source :
Here