Comment on SEO Silo Theme by SEO Dave.

SEO Silo Structure Simplifying sounds like a good idea SEO wise, with Google giving us an indication performance SEO and usability is going to be increasingly important, less is better.

On this site I run Stallion Responsive plus the following plugins:

W3 Total Cache – Very important for performance
EWWW Image Optimizer – Important for performance (there are other similar plugins)
Subscribe to Comments Reloaded – for users tracking comments
Broken Link Checker – turned off 99% of the time, turn it on once a month to check for dead links etc…
A custom plugin for selling products (Stallion sales).
Google XML Sitemaps (my custom version for testing indexing all Stallion SEO Super Commets, not sure I’ll be keeping it yet).

That’s it.

The Stallion SEO Posts Widget (which includes the silo SEO features) only covers WordPress Posts, so if you plan to create 130 subpages that are static Pages, no, the SEO Posts Widget only loads WordPress Posts. Next time I’m working on the SEO Posts widgets code I’ll see if Static Pages could be added, would be a useful feature to have that widget available to pages as well: in one of my other comments I’ve linked to a development version of the widget with more silo SEO options, you should use it as SEO silos are important to you.

Personally I avoid using static pages, there isn’t anything special about them output wise**, they are basically WordPress Posts that aren’t added to categories, tags, archives, search meaning you are taking them out of the automated linking that makes WordPress so easy to use.

With a static Page you have to either manually add links to it (custom menus for example: “Appearance” >> “Menus” which can be added as widgets) or use the basic Page widget that lack features and is not suitable for hundreds of pages. I think the WordPress Static Page concept was meant for a small number of pages, about, contact sort of stuff rather than build an entire site with them.

** In core WordPress Static Pages have a Page Template system not available to WordPress Posts, but Stallion Responsive has a feature that means we can use Page Templates on Posts as well (turn on: Stallion Layout Options page). I also added features to Static Pages that are normally only available to Posts as well (if I recall correctly Pages normally lack comments). In Stallion using Posts is almost always better for the internal linking options.

Only reason to use Pages over Posts is the lack of automated internal linking, since nothing is automatically linked you can manually build SEO silos, presumably why pretty much everything WordPress silo SEO wise I’ve looked at uses Pages and not Posts: going to have to look to develop a new feature to add a check box on posts to automatically take them out of normal category linking etc… then there would be no need for Pages.

If you create the subpages as Static Pages you could use custom menus and use the Stallion Display widgets feature (turn on, on the Stallion Layouts Options page) to set which sections of the site to load them on.

Create a custom menu for each top static Page that has subpages adding which ever subpages you want in the custom menu: there’s no automation, it’s a lot more effort than using the Stallion SEO Posts widget. Add the custom menu widget to a sidebar selecting the custom menus you’ve created and select which parts of the site that widget should be shown on. With 130+ static pages the Display Widgets options (bottom of each widget) are going to get cumbersome since static pages are shown for selection.

David