Secret of Rankings

I have a couple of clients that run house plans sites and I'm doing their optimization, linking strategy and Blog/RSS feeds.

While doing the site analysis for my newest client, I went over the all of the top 10 sites in Google that are ranking for "house plans" and "home plans". And then I noticed something that was staring me in the face.

Every one of the first 6 sites ranking in Google had, essentially, their site map on the home page. In other words, if your a house plans site....you like to all your house plans off your home page. This tended to make the site more relevent in terms of internal linking (because the links went from the home page to a particular house plan lower level page and it upped the on-page factors. Many of the sites in the top 20, over all (probably more than half) used this strategy.