Analyzing Product Hunt's sitemap
If you haven't heard, Product Hunt is a massively popular website where founders can post their SaaS products and get feedback on them.
I took the time and crawled their website to reverse engineer how they have built their website's page hierarchy.
By breaking down their sitemap we are going to learn the techniques they use to rank high for competitive keywords, get massive amounts of users, and create tons of engagement.
At the end of this article I'm going to give you the exact checklist you can apply to your own website.
Identify main content on your website
People visit Product Hunt to discover and share the latest products.
These product posts are the bread and butter of their website and why they are so popular. They are the most essential content and everything else on the website should only exists to emphasize their importance and discoverability.
In the diagram the Post objects have the most lines leading into it.
This means that it's being linked into from many different places.
This helps people to discover new posts wherever they are in the website.
These products posts are user generated content but in your case the content might be created by yourself.
For AirBnb it's apartments.
For YouTube it's videos.
For Twitch it's live streams.
Create list pages
Now that you have figured out what content your users are most likely wanting to find on your website, it is your job to make it as easy as possible for them to find it.
You want to create pages where you can list the content.
Let's look at how Product Hunt does it.
They have multiple different Topic pages where they can list the appropriate posts.
You can also find posts on user profiles. Either submitted by the user or in their collection.
Posts in collections can be from other people too. This will create a lot of engagement as you will have multiple different ways to interact with other people's posts.