Subindex Pages Create New Website Entry Points

Subindex pages offer new entries points for website visitors as well as new ways of ranking more pages in search engines.

Website entry points usually consist of a homepage, article pages and internal index pages that aggregate articles. Opportunities abound.

Index pages have a natural limit with the number of titles or headlines along with abstracts that don’t exceed a certain visual appeal.

One of the old rules of thumb was no more than 100 links per page. But even that number seems high on actual pages. Too many links crowd the page and dilute the impact of the most important links.

Cutting back on that number creates a potential problem. On medium to large sites, does some content get buried so deeply that people and search engines have trouble finding it?

Likewise, too many internal index pages create potential navigation problems. Most sites have a horizontal navigation bar with limited space for links. Quite a few enhance the bar with dropdowns, but research shows that the click rate for dropdowns is low.

Subindex pages that appear prominently on index pages can improve the ability for people and search engines to find content.

Think of a subindex page as a subcategory. For example, a travel website has an index page in the navigation bar about the Caribbean. That index page has subindex pages about the eastern, western and southern Caribbean regions that are each popular with cruise lines.

The eastern Caribbean subindex can go even deeper with its own subindexes dedicated to each island in the eastern Caribbean. But it doesn’t end there.

More Potential for Subindex Pages

The opportunity for even more subindexes will depend on finding similar content between two or more existing subindexes.

Again using Caribbean content, it is then possible to create a Caribbean attractions subindex using attraction content from each island. Weather from each island can aggregate into a broader weather page.

Sites that have dated content can do something similar. Annual events that take place in the same month each year can merge onto subindexes for January, February and the other 10 months. They also can merge into more subindexes based on the type of event.

This type of organization also creates great potential for building archives.

Although aggregating content into specific topics is normal for website publishing, many publishers focus on broader topics and move on to other priorities. They may miss many, many opportunities for organizing content into an extensive system of subindexing not unlike the Dewey decimal system in public libraries.

In reality, a website with thousands if not hundreds of thousands of pages will find that library thinking about subindexes creates potential for attracting more visitors and better search engine indexing.