Evaluating Subcategory Pages

If a website is very large it will need to break its categories into subcategories and link to them from the category pages. The subcategory pages should be set up exactly like category pages. The only difference is that instead of linking to more subcategory pages, they should link directly to content pages. Keep in mind that they have less link juice to pass than category pages (because they are more links away from the homepage), s o subcategory pages should contain as few links as possible. This is because the amount of link juice a link passes is determined by both the link popularity of the given page and the number of links it contains.

Similarly to category pages, subcategory pages should do the following:

• Be useful for the user
• Direct link juice to all applicable content pages
• Have enough unique content to be indexed by the search engines

Evaluating Content Pages

Content pages are the meat of websites. They are the reason visitors came to the site, and just like a good breakfast, these pages should leave those visitors feeling fulfilled and smelling of delicious bacon. (I made up that last part, but if a website really did smell like bacon, I would surely link to it.) The pages should be very specific to a given topic (usually a product or an object) and be hyper-relevant.

As an SEO you should be looking to see if the purpose of the page is directly stated in all of the following areas:

• Title tag
• URL
• Content of page
• Images

NOTE Good content pages act as link magnets. They are much more likely to receive links than subcategory and category pages. Smart SEOs use this as an advantage and have content pages link back to their applicable category and subcategory pages. This then increases the amount of juice flowing to all of the content pages on the website and makes them all rank better.

Good Example of a Content Page

The topic of the page is stated in the title tag (Super Mario World –Wikipeda, the free encyclopedia); the URL (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Mario_World), the page’s content (Notice the page heading, “Super Mario World”); and again within the alt text of the images on the page.

An Ideal Content Page

An ideal content page should do all of the following:

• Be hyper-relevant to a specific topic (usually a product or single object)
• Include subject in title tag
• Include subject in URL
• Include subject in image alt text
• Specify subject several times throughout text content
• Provide unique content about a given subject
• Link back to its category page
• Link back to its subcategory page
• Link back to its homepage (normally accomplished with an image
• link showing the website logo on the top left of a page)