In honor of end-of-year reflection and round-ups, I wanted to use my last blog post of 2010 to pay homage to the classic Top 10 List. From popular radio to Cosmopolitan to Letterman to your best friend's blog, Top 10 Lists have always been able to captivate the curiosities of many an audience. They can be fun or insightful, they make us laugh, they make us think...and sometimes they might even rile us up. Put that sucker on your website and BAM: you've got a simple little viral SEO tool.

With that, I present the Top 10 SEO Benefits of Top 10 Lists:

1. They're easy to read. Things that are easy to read get read. (<- This is kind of a good thing for your website.)
2. The format of a Top 10 List allows for whimsy, so you don't really need a reason to write one. In fact, sometimes the quirkier, the better. Drum up a random idea and connect it loosely to your website's focus for FUN, fresh content.
3. Things that are FUN to read get read...and shared. The more your Top 10 List gets emailed and republished, the more links you're getting back to your website. (Yay, links!)
4. They're a somewhat "safe" way to comment on controversial topics. If you want web content that speaks to really topical matters, but are afraid to get too "heavy," a Top 10 List of, say, key takeaways from a recently overturned bill, can be a softer way to broach the topic than some long diatribe. (Or a cutting way to attack the matter head-on, if you are more willing to do so.) Plus, it can help your readers better comprehend the topic...and help their friends better comprehend...and them their friends... (you see what I'm going for here, right?)
5. They're easy to write. It's a list, for cripe's sake...ignore convention! Fragment the thing. Use some slang and repetition. Follow your own formatting rules...I mean, whatevs, right?
6. They're a creative way to target a unique keyword. Maybe there's a variation on one of your main key phrases that you'd like your site to perform a little better for-fit that into a Top 10 List for quick, targeted content.
7. Top 10 Lists make for a nice series, a la David Letterman's daily Top 10. Why not start a weekly Top 10 series on your website, for built-in fresh, easy-to-write content? If you write them well, these will get followed by your loyalists and, yes, shared.
8. They're versatile. You can make your Top 10 a list of tips, questions, excuses, uses, jokes, things, phrases, anything.
9. They're easy to share on microblog platforms like Twitter. A tweet like "Top 10 Places in Chicago to See Celebs" with a short bit.ly link back to your list is compelling and, at 60 or so characters, very re-tweetable.
10. Repeating your target keyword enough on any given page, while keeping your content readable and natural can be tough. But take a look back over this post at how many times I've repeated "Top 10 Lists," since that is the topic of my list. And that repetition doesn't seem forced, right? Well look at that!

Happy new year and have fun writing your lists in 2011!