The Miracle of the ‘Popular Story Widget’

I probably don’t need to tell you how valuable widgets and sidebars are to a site’s page views and general traffic.

What you may not be aware of, however, is how golden they are for SEOs!

Let’s take a quick look at some effective uses of these features on well-known sites:

1) Yahoo! News. Yahoo! News features an entire page of ‘most popular’ stories, which is obviously popular with many. But the lack of a similar widget decreases the chances of pulling someone away from the current page to send them off to another.

2) Slate.com. A widget that displays both ‘most emailed’ and ‘most read’ which, I assume, measures standard page views.

3) Newsweek.com. This one is pretty ingenious. Not only does this site combine Slate.com’s feature of ‘most emailed’ and ‘most viewed’, it also allows you to post to your own website. It also provides a time scale that shows which story is most popular as little as 12 hours ago.

4) NYTimes.com. We have a winner! This gem has a three-tab system that that shows the ‘most-emailed’ and ‘most searched’, it also shows which stories has been blogged the most! Talk about pandering to bloggers!

These features give SEOs the opportunity to know their audience more effectively, earn links to the site, and can benefit your site’s rankings in news searches.

Posted under SEO by Luna  Print This Post