Great post. I agree about content silos and in copywriting terms they are also called “content landing pages”, which are exactly what you mentioned.

Ironically, SEO copywriting is kind of like the “last mile” to targeted search rankings. Like the “last mile” issues in the broadband industry where you can have thousands of miles of high speed fiber carrying loads of data across the country. If the final connection to the customer’s home is aging copper, the benefit of fiber is lost. Likewise, if you do everything right by building a site Google Trusts, but don’t specifically tell google that your page content matches the words people are actually searching for, the targeted traffic is lost.

Google’s sole purpose in life is to deliver sites that they feel are exactly what people are seeking out.

Here are some other elements that play into the factor:

1. Title tags and URL structure. Very important. Also H tags.
2. Content. Content. Content. Extremely important.
3. Backlinks from trusted sources (a lot of them)
4. LSI – Google is using this more and more and it’s Latent Semantic Indexing which is a fancy way of saying that the spiders which crawl the site are smart enough to recognize concepts that should relate. In other words, if your site is about baking cookies, then the spiders will expect to see stuff about sugar, or baking soda, or eggs, etc.

Thanks for posting such a great topic!