One of the keys to a website designed to fully maximize its search engine optimization potential is the use of linking within subject matter themes. We try to implement this in all of our small business website design and SEO campaigns. Mystic Liquid is designed following these same principles.

This SEO theory is not a new one. Bruce Clay has been pioneering this type of on-site optimization for what seems forever with what he calls “siloing”. If you want to know everything there is to know about siloing, I recommend reading this review about two or three times and then studying up this post. Even Rand over at SEOMoz has caught the siloing bug as noted in one of his recent posts.

The reason why everyone is buzzing about siloing/sculpting/thematic linking is because it works. Wait, let me correct myself – It REALLY works.

Thanks to Bruce Clay

For example, we have two sites we were doing some link building for and we cleaned up the site’s internal linking structure with a few well placed nofollow links. Within a few months we noticed they were starting to rank for more keywords than before and they also had a jump in PageRank during Google’s last update. So there really is something to Bruce’s theory of siloing and I would like to thank him for making our jobs so much easier!

For those who are not sure what I’m talking about, this type of website design links internal pages of a site only to pages with similar subject matter. This is how a thematic website structure is created. A well thought out structure based on themes maintains a clearly defined definition of the different sections in a website.

Another advantage of organizing your website this way is that it allows you to target specific keywords and keyword variations in respect to a particular section. You won’t dilute the PageRank juice of your links because the thematic structure reinforces their by keeping them in similar subject matter themes while using great anchor text keywords.

Think of your site as a book

The best way to describe is to think of your website as a book and each section are its chapters. One subsection of your website represents a group of subject-specific content much like chapters of a book outline specific ideas. The different chapters of the website are made up of HTML pages compared to the individual files within that folder.

One final thing to remember when designing your site following this structure is to make sure you have enough content to support the sections. It is a good move to have at least five pages of content per subsection or theme if you expect to build any sort of relevancy within that particular theme. It’s been proven that Google penalize websites with anything less. (Shameless self-promotion) Find yourself a pretty good content writer and you won’t need to worry about this problem.