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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?

For one client whose work is generating some interesting potential headlines (business technology for the financial sector), I'm starting to experiment with PressKing.com.  It's a distribution wire that's roughly like DM'ing an unusually large, influential Google+ circle.  It's too early to call it a success, but here's why I think it's important to use in tandem with any PR:

1. Their database includes journalists and bloggers who've consented to receiving fresh news on an overwhelming list of topics. Client wants to publicize a new patent for mobile checking?  Want to get your PR in front of 2000+ US-based columnists who've expressed interest in "ATMs", "Business Technology", or "Digital Imaging"?  (It seems like a good idea, no?)  You can do that with PressKing, and the contacts span from high-DA sites like NYTimes, Bloomberg, and WSJ to niche news sites and industry quarterlies.
2. If you're already using OSE to identify where related sites receive links from, and you know your client's low-hanging fruit (i.e. sites that link to multiple competitors but not to your client's site), it could be an excellent idea to add contact email addresses from those sites to the distribution list.  Would it be more effective to reach out directly to individual journalists with a personalized note?  Probably – but if you don't have the time, I think there's a way to do this respectfully, and successfully.

The technical considerations of which keywords to use, what anchor text, to which pages, I think are old-world considerations that obscure the real issue.  The real issue is how to get links to your latest and greatest content while it's still fresh, and "fresh" is powerful bait for many journalists seeking word counts to occupy an otherwise slow news day.  I hope this helps!