It should come as no surprise that having a widget or sidebar element on a news, blog or articles website is great for traffic and page views. Online outlets have been using them to boost readership, email-a-friend features and page views per session counts for years. But, did you know that they're also great for SEO?

Let's take a look at some examples and investigate the myriad of benefits "most popular" sections provide:

Slate.com

Slate's most popular widget isn't the best designed or most fully featured, but it provides the basic concept - display a list of stories from your site, ordered by a popularity metric. In this case, Slate's offering both "most emailed" (stories that have had lots of people use the "email a friend" feature) and "most read," which I'm assuming they calculate on raw page views.

Newsweek.com

Newsweek's widget has the clever slider at the bottom, allowing you to see popularity on a granular time scale from as little as 12 hours ago to as much as 7 days. If it were me, I'd increase the granularity option all the way up to the last 1-2 hours, just so bloggers can get their hands on the very freshest stuff. The "most viewed" vs. "most emailed" is smart, too, as is the opportunity to share the widget on your own website (which I've done below).

My only complaint is that all those beautiful links are contained in an object the search engines won't parse, and thus, Newsweek doesn't get any credit or juice from them. At the least, placing a straight HTML link below the object would be a smart way to increase link popularity in a natural and search engine approved way.

Yahoo! News

Yahoo! News does things a bit differently and features an entire page (linked to in the top, tabular menu) labeled "most popular" that lists the stories from the day getting the most attention. It's not a bad system, and I imagine that a lot of folks really enjoy having a full page of content that displays the most popular news, but losing the widget format means those stories don't enjoy the ability to tease right from another story page, one of the big draws of having the "most popular" widget.

NYTimes.com

The New York Times is putting a lot of the best practices together. Not only is their widget shown on the vertical sidebar half to three quarters of the way down the page (in a spot where the eye falls during or just after reading a story), it's got three tabs showing the most e-mailed, most searched and, in a move of sheer genius, most blogged. Bloggers love this stuff - it's a tab just for them, showing what they're talking about and what they think is important. Just as pandering in politics can win you elections, pandering to bloggers, particularly if you're a big media outfit, can win you blog links. Finally, NYTimes also a link off to the "complete list" for each section, so those heavily into the popular news can browse from there. Once you're there, you can then use a time sort feature to see stories from different time periods.

So, while the user benefits are pretty clear, why is this so great for SEO?

• Quick link juice - the links, so long as they're HTML links the engines can parse, send a flood of juice to the top stories, which are often the ones most likely to benefit from Google's temporal rankings push (for hot search terms) and the inclusion of "news results" in the SERPs.
• Helping to earn links - the most popular stories can convert someone who wasn't interested or had only a passing curiosity in one story into a fervent reader, and often inspire the sharing behavior. After all, if a story is "most e-mailed" or "most-blogged," there's a fair chance you'll email it or blog it, increasing the ROI for the site.
• Ongoing internal link juice for big stories - Having a most popular page that links to all the stories generating the most buzz for the last week or month continues to send link juice in to stories that are likely to attract the most searches.
• Opportunity to better know your audience - If you personally play around with and pay attention to your most popular stories on a day-to-day basis, the results can help you learn more about what your audience likes, what earns links, attention and sharing behavior. This can also help you generate stories and content for the future that will continue to leverage these strengths and earn greater links and traffic.

I'm looking forward to hearing your feedback and potential suggestions for how to leverage these features to even greater degrees.