Keyword Themes and Consumer Silos

July 5th, 2008

Consistency throughout the search engine optimization structure of an ecommerce site with both internal linking and keywords will help you capture the organic rankings you deserve.

There was a great article about internal linking and how to engineer the anchor text from SEOmoz which expresses my thoughts exactly about how to structure internal linking. Below is a short cut from that article.

“In the example, we have a website that wants to build search-targeted pages for 4 unique keyword terms:

* Wind

* Wind Energy

* Wind Turbines

In order to effectively communicate to the engines (and to users) which page is targeting each particular keyword, I’ve used anchor text from the generic “wind” page to each of the more specific subpages and, likewise, linked back to the generic “wind” page from those subpages with the singular anchor text phrase “wind.”

Proper internal link engineering is a great way to help your rankings, and pairs itself up with what I am going to talk about, which is keyword themes and consumer silos throughout the site, and how running your internal linking structure from these keywords and across these silos will greatly help boost the relevancy and power of those links. Read more about linking strategies which talks about external linking coming in, but the way the link is engineered is virtually the same.

Consumer Silos:

These are created when you have more then one major consumer category or service and the products within those silos interact with one another. For example let’s take bestbuy.com. I would say they have 4 major silos which are Home Entertainment, Computers, Music, and Appliances. Within these silos are specific categories and keywords that all interact with one another, but hold a separate universe of buyers.

“Keyword themes throughout an ecommerce site and within each consumer silo for your meta data are one of the keys to ranking for a specific keyword set. As we have discovered with testing, the title tag is one of the primary factors for ranking within Google and if engineered properly can have one of the greatest impacts on ranking”, said Bill Ross Of Rank Better SEO. A keyword theme is made up of primary and secondary keywords that represent your goals, products and overall image you want to site to represent.

Primary Keyword Themes for each Consumer Silo:

These are representative of your core products within each consumer silo from a high level view. This set should contain 3 or 4 major terms for a site that has over 30 pages since the ratio of total unique pages of copy to your major keyword set will need to be larger since these are usually highly competitive terms you will be looking to optimize for. For the bestbuy.com example lets take the Music Silo, you might have primary keywords such as “country, rap, rock”. The Home Entertainment Silo might have HDTV, CD Players, DVD Players. You can use these or the secondary keywords for the anchor text for the internal link engineering where it makes sense.

Secondary Keyword Themes:

These represent secondary goals or products for the site. These should be more specific product names or specific categories. These secondary keywords should span across the consumer silos for up selling. bestbuy.com now within each of these primary keyword sets there are secondary sets like Sony CD Player for the home entertainment silo, or The Dixie Chicks for the music silo. These secondary keywords can be used to up sell someone who just got a new Sony CD player for their house and needs a CD.

Creating a keyword theme for the site should be done when the site is built, redesigned or re-engineered this will ensure all the organic ranking factors can be taken into account and it will give you a holistic approach to your keyword theme and produce the best rankings. This involves comparing a keywords analysis to your product set, goals and competitive landscape.

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