Im looking for DP (regional) directory owner's opinion and advice on: Categories/Subcategories to use for a regional directory... Should I go for a DMOZ structure? Arts, Business, Health..... Or something more like? Region 1, Region 2, then subcategories Business, Health? Looking forward to hearing your experiences..
As it is a regional directory : For category, you should use your provinces or your states. For sub-category, you should use subjects such as travel, internet, business, etc.
Ok so first regions and then subjects... Would it still be plausible/recommendable to use subcategories? I mean the lower you go the less Google passes PR and indexes.. No?
Your taxonomy really is a personal choice. I go for subject areas, with a separate category for regional sites. The thing is, most regional websites are both regional and topic-oriented. Most of them aren't very tightly targetted to one region either. So you could have a business based in a particular town, but which will sell their product country-wide. In that case it would make more sense to search for them by the type of product they sell. I'd put them under Business > Business Type > Region rather than Region > Town > Business Type. The other thing is, if you organise your categories soley by region, then you will inevitably be duplicating a category structure used by many other regional directories.
Good point Obelia! So how about I forget the regions and just go with subjects? The main site will be the head region, would that be enough?
I think that depends on the size of the region. If it's a town or city that could work, but if it's a county or state then it could be a problem when you come across the small percentage of sites that are basically about "everything to do with Smallsville", say. You could shunt them into the tourism category, but it's not always the most logical choice.