Now that we’ve seen the basic hierarchical structures available, why do we want to emulate them? For most sites the home page (main page) is the most important (it tends to have most links to it, highest PR), it will probably be optimized for the most important phrases. The same tends to be true for the department pages, they deal with the general theme of your site. The department pages will tend to focus on the higher traffic SERPs, while the deep product pages will tend to focus on more obscure lower traffic SERPs.
The search engines (Google in particular) determines relevancy of a page for a given SERP not only due to the content of the page, but also the links to that page (the Anchor Text of the links). This site has over 700 pages indexed as of July 1st 2005, every page has the same left menu so all of them link to this page with the anchor text Web Site Optimization. This tells Google etc… this page should be ranked highly for Web Site Optimization. This is a new page (July 1st) and the links won’t take full effect right away, but given time and some external links pointing to this page and it should do OK for the SERP Web Site Optimization.
If this page was not listed on the left menu, but instead just one link from the SEO Tutorial page it would probably not do as well. OK, so now you are thinking “shouldn’t we link every page together then?”. When thinking about individual SERPs, yes because more links to a page, more likely it will do well. However we have to think of the web site as a whole. If we added every link we could from every page we own it’s going to mess with the optimization of the content etc… of individual pages.
You could for example add 40 links from a footer with small text and it won’t look too bad, but that won’t only benefit those 40 pages, it will add 40 lots of anchor text to every page. Will all that anchor text help every page? Probably not, most large sites are quite diverse and so the anchor text of the links is also diverse. Look at the left menu of this site. Currently there are 3 main sections “SEO Tutorial”, “SEO Services” and “SEO Book Store” with the latter having 2 sub-sections “Search Engine Books” and “Web Design Books”. The most important SERPs for this site are phrases related to SEO and Search engine Optimization.
Look at the anchor text of the links on the left menu, most of them use SEO, Search Engine or Optimization as the anchor text. Only the “Web Design Books” sub-section doesn’t help the main SERPs, so from 25 links 15 help the main SERPs, 10 do not. We could easily add 25 more links to that menu without ruining the look of the site, but it will be at the detrerment of some pages SERPs. Basically we can’t help all pages equally, we must concentrate our main efforts on the most important pages, those whose search engine rankings will result in greatest traffic.
Fortunately this doesn’t mean the deeper content pages do poorly in their respective SERPs. You will find the deeper content pages tend to gain lower traffic easier SERPs. The sort of SERPs where you don’t need masses of links/anchor text to do well. SERPs like MSN Today, ASP for Dummies, Marketing Disasters and Extreme Search Engine Optimization where a little on page optimization is enough for a top 10 listing.
Regards
Rohit Mehra
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