What's a really good example of a linkbait-y Category / Subcategory hierarchy?
-
Rand makes a really great point in this 2009 post about the shape of crawl paths:
"#4. Craft navigation / category pages that are worthy of links. If you can make these pages worthy of links and attention, you drive PageRank and crawl priority further down your site's architecture into the content (and signal the engine that ALL your pages are important."
Which makes sense, intuitively, because you'd like link juice to flow directly and undiluted to your money pages. "Here's all my Green Widgets, Roger: they're all right here. While you're at it, here's a related blog post—'5 Ridiculously Awesome Things Every Green Widget Buyer Should Know'—and, oh look! Would you like to see my Blue Widgets as well?"
In practice, though, the Home » Widgets » Green Widgets doesn't sound all that alluring. Useful, absolutely, for UX, but not for getting links. Anyone have some favorite examples of Category / Subcategory hierarchies that do well as link-bait?
Client is a marketing agency dealing in the technical arcana of databases and ad serving, so their money pages won't be as specific as a Green Widget or a Miami Hotel. Their site isn't huge, and the pages will be extensively interlinked, so the emphasis has more to do with link juice / page authority than indexation. But I'm wondering if it could it be smart to replace a generic "Services" category with a KW-rich drop-down menu of "Marketing Solutions" (i.e. 'Increase Customer Retention') and link each landing page to a relevant charcuterie of services, white papers, webinars, case studies, etc., rather than keeping these pages in their respective silos—even as they link horizontally to related services?
-
Link Building-Focused Examples:
Stephanie Chang has a good SEOMoz article on Creative link building for ecommerce sites that discusses good pages.
Design Examples:
Another article on Smashing Magazine details some beautiful/creative ecommerce designs. While the post is slightly more focused on the design, there are some good examples on there of unique content, too. Both are important in earning links on otherwise boring pages, and will greatly increase user trust and conversions if done well. Here are some other similar articles from Smashing Magazine: Design Showcase Of Creative Online-Shops, 35 Beautiful E-Commerce Websites.
**Seat Geek: **
This is an OK example that comes to mind of content - but they could do better. If you look at a page like http://seatgeek.com/paul-mccartney-tickets/#about, you'll see on the left sidebar that there are tabs for "About Paul McCartney Tickets" which contains some statistics about concert ticket prices, among other things. They could do a better job by improving the design of the page and making it more visually appealing, and by featuring this content above the tickets themselves, rather than hiding it on the about tab like they're currently doing.
Service Sites:
For a Service site... nothing changes. Instead of assisting a user in the decision process between products, you're doing it for services. Make the design look sharp, keep all of those pages 1 click from the homepage unless there's tons of them, and make the pages useful to the user.
Regarding the "Marketing Solutions" concept, I'd say give users two options: browse by service itself, or browse by solution. This satisfies them whether they know what they're looking for or not, and it adds context to the existing service pages.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Are good directories still worth submitting to
Hi guys we have launched a new site and need to get some links is it still worth submitting to (paid and unpaid) directories like Yell.com - obviously we would only consider the non spammy ones cheers
Link Building | | odysseytravels0 -
Would it be a valid "link building' strategy to pay youtube video owners, to link to our company website in the decription of a certain video. ( For popular video's that are relevant )
I was wondering if it would it be a valid "link building' strategy to pay / work out a deal with youtube video owners, to link to our company website in the decription of a certain video they posted? ( For popular video's that are relevant to our business. ) Anyone have any thoughts on this? Thanks in advance! Steven
Link Building | | RockyMountainFlyboard0 -
What Makes A 'Natural Link Profile'?
I find it hard to recognize unnatural link patterns when the links to my site are so familiar. It can be hard to see the wood for the trees! How many links from one site is too many? Does it depend on the size of the site? Thanks for your advice on this.
Link Building | | T0BY0 -
Totally puzzled by link building/content marketing
Hey Mozzers! 🙂 I'm going to be starting link building for a website soon and I am having some trouble wrapping my head around a couple of things. First of all, in the current world of SEO, where should I be looking to generate links? Is it as simple as reaching out to bloggers and trawling through competitors links? Or is there something more? In relation to this, if I were to generate a good number of links from high authority sites, how would this effect my ranking for keywords (assuming the anchor text for those links is the website URL)? The other thing I'm a little puzzled by is, if I were to write a great article on the websites blog and it gains traction in social media circles, people would (I assume) only share a link to the blog post instead of the actual article itself. How would this effect the ranking of keywords that I have optomised (anchor text etc.) for in the article? I assume this is where guest blogging would come in? Any help would be HUGELY appreciated. I've been trying to logic this one out the last couple of days and just can't do it 😕 Thanks a lot to anyone who replies 🙂
Link Building | | CD_20161 -
Trading Backlinks a good idea?
New to the "backlinking" party. Wondering if its 'good practice' to trade links with other websites within a like-industry. We've been receiving a lot of emails from other websites asking us to trade links. Is this a good link building practice anymore? Thanks!
Link Building | | asa-php0 -
SEO Package: Good Value?
I'm having a real hard time trying to dig through all the BS and find a reputable SEO company that delivers quality and value. Anyway, here's a package that I'm considering from a company called eBrandz. It seems a bit overpriced to me, but I don't have a lot of experience with reputable SEO companies, so I'm hoping someone can weigh in - on both the package itself for the price, and the company (if you have any information about them). $1500/month 8 Guest Posts (With 80 Bookmarks) 8 Articles with Syndication (With 80 Bookmarks) 1 Press Release (With Bookmarking) 75 "Curated Business Directory Submissions" Social Bookmarking for 5 Urls (Each Url to 20 Sites) 1 (every other month) Video Creation (45 to 90 seconds) With Submission and Bookmarking.
Link Building | | JABacchetta0 -
DmT/DmR
The ratio of DmT/DmR is greater than 1 on all my pages but the domain and subdomain ratios are less than 1. Can someone explain what could cause this? Isn't the domain and subdomain DmT/DmR ratio the result of all pages or are there any other factors?
Link Building | | ieng0 -
I cannot get any links indexed to this website http://atglimo.com.
I have written nofollow, follow links, issued a press release, and submitted to the Universal Business Listing. None of these links are showing in the Yahoo index. I did a nofollow bookmark with delicious and it disappeared the next day. The people that built the website will not grant FTP access and modded the HTACCESS file incorrectly to point to a WWW. version of the site. I had them remove the index.html duplicate content problem. What is going on? Why are no links showing in the index for this site?
Link Building | | eddie404ATL0