If you are doing SEO for an e-commerce site, it is critically important to optimize your category pages. In fact, there may be cases in which it is more important to optimize your category pages even more than your product pages.
Natural search visitors to your product pages with naturally convert well. Odds are that the searcher used your branded phrase to come upon the listing for your product page and clicked through. If someone knows exactly what brand and product they are looking for, to the point that they type those words into a search engine, they are very likely interested and more apt to convert.
Category pages are a slightly different beast. Category pages are less likely to be high converting entrance pages, at least relative to your product pages. Think about it: the user does a search for a generic term, say HDTVs. There is a good chance that they will find a listing for a category page that has HDTVs of all different sizes, brands and price ranges. At this point, they may just be doing research on a new TV. They will browse through the category pages, click through to specific product and then back out to the category page.
Category pages will naturally have higher traffic than product specific pages. This isn’t always the case, but it will be like this more times than not. Visitors to these pages are in a different phase of the buying cycle, but they are in the buying cycle nonetheless and it is important to try to capture these visitors.
When optimized correctly, your category pages should have the opportunity to rank for more generic non-branded keyphrases, with the exception of brand level category pages which obviously would rank well for the specific brand phrase. It can be easy to run into indexation issues with category pages that have many products and thus many pages, although this can be alleviated by creating work-arounds where search engines see all the products for the category on a single page.
When you do SEO for an ecommerce site, it is easy to give priority to optimizing product pages since that is where the conversion happens. However, category pages get significant levels of traffic, and neglecting these pages can mean neglecting a very large audience that has a high likelihood of converting.
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