Understanding the different types of “links” is essential for a professional SEO to rank a website higher using silos.

There are three main types of links that a web page needs to consist of: internal, outbound, and inbound.

Internal links are a link that sends the reader from one webpage to another within the same website. 

Outbound links send the reader to another website. 

Inbound links are where other websites send their readers to ours. 

Internal Links

Today we are going to be going over the importance of internal linking. For all of my comic nerds out there: when I think of internal links on a website, I think of the X-men character Blink. Blink has the portal powers allowing her to make strategic moves. Links on any page of your website are like portals to access new pages.  

When building a new site or updating your current website, it is essential to use internal links to connect the pages. Properly connecting your site pages helps search engines understand the architecture for the website and tells the search engine crawlers the site’s page hierarchy.

SEO Professionals call internal linking strategies “silos.” 

Let’s focus on how to silo a website using internal links so that the site gets the most search engine exposure. For this example, let’s say that your website specializes in the restoration field.

What are link silos?

As mentioned earlier, links are link portals that help search engine crawlers navigate between web pages. Linking compelling content within your website is a great strategy that has several rewarding benefits, including:

1. Encourages search engine crawlers to crawl more pages on your site 
2. Supports the link juice from inbound links across multiple pages
3. Powerful SEO ranking signals by the use of anchor texts 

SEO link structure is a topic of debate. With our findings, we have found these three strategies to work the best:

Power page

When a web page has many quality inbound links, this will be known as a power page. When you use internal links from the power page, it will give away its link juice. To utilize this method, go to your Google Webmaster Tools and navigate the sidebar “Links.” You will be able to download a spreadsheet to find your most linked content and identify the most inbound links to your website. 

This tool will allow you to see where there are link deficits. You can then start using anchor texts to link out and enable your site’s power pages to share the link juice to other chosen internal pages. 

Category Silo 

This specific method requires your site to have a blog with taxonomies (categories). Let’s say the target keyword is “water damage company in Houston.” 

Two obvious categories would be “water damage” & “Houston.” The next step would be to create quality content for each of these specific categories. Then you will link category posts together using anchor texts back to the category silo, “Water Damage Company in Houston.”

Also, use anchor texts to link the category post (water damage company in Houston) to the target page (content about water damage, content about Houston). Make sure that the anchor text is related to your keywords.

Circle Silo 

Say we have the leading water damage page that we are looking to silo blog posts too. For this strategy, we will want the category “water damage” to link to three blog relevant posts. It’s called a circle silo because the related posts all circle the one page we are trying to rank. 

When performing this strategy, make sure that the blog posts are about a singular topic and link back to the related targeted silo page. Also, be sure that the category blog posts link to the other blog posts in the same category. 

Make sure to keep each circle independent; linking multiple circles breaks the chain. 

This strategy will help search engine crawlers know how relevant the page is to the main silo webpage. 

Wrapping Up

Blog posts should only link to the main silo page; linking to multiple silo pages will break the chain. You can follow this strategy for every silo page that you are looking to rank higher. 
These three internal linking strategies help make a web page rank higher. If you are looking for SEO services or support in ranking your restoration or construction website, please fill out our contact form, and we will respond within 24 hours.