Relational Menus
If you are using the same menu on every single page of your site (a global navigational menu) then you are pushing a lot of link juice to the pages you are linking to. However, what if you could instead redirect some of that PageRank to your tier three pages in a user-friendly way? Not only would you see a boost in the rankings of these pages, but it is also a very user friendly way to show related content the visitor might be interested in.
What I do is use relational menus. I call it "relational" because depending on the category of the piece of content the user is currently on, the menu will change.
For example, on this site I use a right-hand menu structure. On the homepage and all of my category pages I list the different categories. However, if a visitor clicks down to read a pice of "Search Engine Marketing" content the right-hand menu changes to show links to my most popular and important posts pertaining to SEO. What this does is increase the PageRank that is pushed to these pages, enabling them to rank higher in the search engine results.
Other webmasters who use this trick also try to block the links to other category pages, thus preserving and pushing more PageRank to the tier three pages. However, I leave the links to my other category pages as well. For me, these pages serve as landing pages for highly competitive keywords so I still want to push as much link juice as I can to them.
If you try to block link juice from passing through your links you have to use javascript or other technical tricks of the trade. It's easy to screw up. If you do mess something up, you will be doing yourself more harm than good.
In WordPress I use this simple trick to display relational menus. On the template that shows your posts find the call to include your menu. It will look something like this:
<?php
include(TEMPLATEPATH."/sidebar.php");
?>
You want to replace that code with something like:
<?php
if ( in_category('keyword-strategy') ) { include(TEMPLATEPATH."/keywordsidebar.php");}
else if ( in_category('search-engine-marketing') ) {
include(TEMPLATEPATH."/seosidebar.php");
} else if ( in_category('social-media-marketing') ) {
include(TEMPLATEPATH."/socialsidebar.php");
}
else {
include(TEMPLATEPATH."/sidebar.php");
}
?>
In place of "keyword-strategy" you will want to include the slug of a category on your site. Obviously name the sidebar something specific for each category of menus you want to include. You can do this with as many categories as you have on your site, just keep adding "else if" statements to include them.
If the category related to your post is not in your list, the default is used. If you select more than one category, the one that shows up first in your if statement is displayed.