How to rank a product category page?

How to rank a product category page well?

In some sites like blogs, good content means great articles,
but what about online shopping sites? What determines a page's quality? And how can a product category page rank higher?

If you can put content on category pages then you can optimize them too.

you mean I can write something about the category, like writing a blog?

I personally send links to these inner pages with the keyword anchor text and also optimize the url, title + meta description to the keyword.

The SEO agency I used to work for had about 500-1000 words of content describing each category, below or above the products.

dontgo said:

How to rank a product category page well?

In some sites like blogs, good content means great articles,
but what about online shopping sites? What determines a page's quality? And how can a product category page rank higher?

Click to expand...

Use unique introductory text, not boilerplates
It’s reasonably valid to assume a search engine’s ability to spot duplication extends to a capability to spot clusters of duplicated text inside a “unique” block of text. With this in mind, we’ve found it beneficial to rewrite the text on the most important category pages. Yes, it’s a bit of work but it does have an impressive impact.

Take your top 100 category pages (if you have that many) and try writing between 100 to 150 words of uniqueness for each. As an ongoing, page by page process it’s really not that big a deal. If you haven’t got the resource, there are numerous solutions beyond commiting to re-writing in-house. For example, you might wish to hire the services of a http://www.seomoz.org/blog/leveraging-mechanical-turk-odesk-elance-craigslist-for-seo or get to grips with the http://www.textbroker.com/us/client-api.php.

Display review data on each product

What did your customers say about the products listed on your category page? Who knows! It’s not normally until a visitor arrives at the product page level that they get a chance to read what previous purchasers thought of that particular product. While using hReview on a page in the correct way can improve your CTR, it can also influence conversion.

Start studying about Silo structure if you want to rank your eCommerce site and if you just want to rank a a parasite like amazon a simple link blast is enough with proper anchors.