Siloing and navigation menu linking

[c2g]

Still trying to understand siloing and how it relates to displaying links in the navigation menu. I'm working on optimizing a site for a lawyer friend. His site consists of 4 top level pages - index, attorney profile, practice areas, and contact. Then, there are 2 folders that contain all the 2nd-level pages for his 2 practice areas - personal injury and business litigation. The website in question is www(dot)comitzlaw(dot)com.

From what I read about siloing before taking the 30-day SEOMoz trial (which I really like so far, by the way), I set the main (left hand) menu up as follows:

The 4 top level pages only display the "collapsed" navigation menu, which only links to the index pages for personal injury and business litigation. Go anywhere in personal injury, and all pages link to the "expanded" personal injury navigation (links to auto accidents page, wrongful death, motorcycle accidents, etc.) but the "collapsed" business litigation section and vice versa for business litigation's links to personal injury. I did this because, as I understand, it keeps the practice area links on topic (like in a car sales example where you want a Ford section linking to Ford pages and Chevy pages linking to Chevy pages).

Just wondering if anyone thinks I have this set up right. Wondering if the home page should display the "expanded" navigation menu instead or if all top level pages should show the expanded?

Appreciate any thoughts on this. Thanks.

[RDK]

SEO and user experience would benefit from an expanded list on the homepage.  People like to see their options laid out in front of them.  It also will help PR on those individual pages that are only visible when the menu is expanded.

Measure your page rank on those second level pages, edit the homepage to display the expanded menu, wait 3 weeks and measure your rank again.  SEOMoz has a handy keyword tracking tool that would help here.

This strategy is starting to be widely adopted because it is very effective (even on large ecommerce sites with many times more category links than you have).  There is a reason that books start off with a table of content

[c2g]

Thanks for the response. I will give this a try. Would you suggest the expanded menu for the other 3 top level pages or just the home page? Do you agree on collapsing (example) the business litigation menu when in the personal injury section?

PR will be easy to measure since all pages show as 0 for me now.

[RDK]

I would suggest the expanded menu as a static menu bar on all of your pages, but at least the top level pages.  The homepage is by far the most important for the reasons stated above- it looks like your deeper pages are getting indexed, so that's not an issue.

Then it looks like it's time to start link-building!