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See Your Website Through Your Visitors Eyes
By Kim Roach (c) 2006

Every time a visitor comes to your site, they take a particular
path. Their eyes move in quick motion, hopping from one hotspot
to the next. If you don't know how your visitors are traveling,
your conversion rates will suffer dramatically. Fortunately,
there is a company who has performed in-depth testing for
you, revealing the common behaviors of people viewing web pages.

The company is known as Eyetrack and they began studying online
behavior in 1999. Because of these studies they have been able
to help web masters to improve their site designs, headlines,
font sizes, navigation, article formats, and even their ads.

They track eye movements as a visitor travels through a website
and how they scan any individual page. With this information,
they have created heat maps to show where visitors focus most of
their attention. On these heat maps, red areas are the most
popular and blue areas are the least popular.

You can see some examples of heat maps at
http://www.poynterextra.org/eyetrack2004/heatmap.htm

You can also find a complete summary of the EyeTrack results at:
http://www.poynterextra.org/eyetrack2004/index.htm

However, since the results comprise over 300 pages, I've
provided you with the golden nuggets that can be gleaned from
this study below.

Article Formats

Your visitors are certainly not reading your website word for
word. They are scanning and picking out relevant information
that they feel is important. Fortunately, you can attract your
visitors to certain content simply by placing it in the
right spots.

These simple changes can increase your sales, subscriber
sign-ups, and your return on investment.

The headline, for example, is often the first element that
people see on your site. To draw people into an article, you
must have a compelling headline that speaks directly to your
visitors needs and wants.

In fact, a change in the headline on a sales page can produce a
1,900% increase in sales. This is certainly an element that
should not be taken lightly.

You might also want to begin your articles with a boldface
introductory paragraph. 95 percent of readers in the Eyetrack
study viewed all or part of the introduction when presented with
an article to read.

On the Internet, where information abounds and the majority of
people are paralyzed by information overload, most appreciate
the addition of an introductory paragraph that summarizes your
article.

Once they have come to the actual content, however, how do you
get them to continue reading? There are a few formatting issues
to keep in mind when designing the layout of your article.

You will definitely need to use short, snappy paragraphs.
Eyetrack III research found that shorter paragraphs received
twice as many eye fixations as those with longer paragraphs.

Most people also seem to focus on the left side of the page and
look for related words that  might entice them to read closer.
Therefore, you will want to include some important keywords on
the left-hand side of the page so that readers can quickly see
them out and be pulled further into the material.

You can also encourage your readers to continue reading by
using bolding and enticing sub headings.

Font Size

The Eyetrack III research discovered that smaller type
encourages focused reading rather than scanning. Very
interesting. In general, their testing found that people spent
more time focused on small type than large type. The larger type
resulted in increased scanning of the page. Of course, you don't
want your visitors to be squinting to try and read your text.
The key is to find the appropriate balance that will encourage
readers to focus on your text more than they scan.

It was also found that underlined headlines discouraged readers
from viewing the following text. Overall, visual breaks (such as
a line or rule) discourage people from looking at items beyond
the break.

Now, on to one of my favorite web design topics...

Navigation

Eyetracker found that navigation at the top of a homepage
performed best, meaning that it was seen by the highest
percentage of test subjects and looked at for the longest
duration.

Your navigation is best placed on the top or left side of the
page. Why? Simply because this is what people are used to. If
you go along with the crowd, people are much more likely to
effectively browse your website.

Advertising

So, what about ads? As you have probably heard, many people
ignore ads. The online world has a massive case of banner
blindness. However, good placement and design can often improve
your results.

For example, ads in the top and left portions of a homepage
receive the most attention.

Ads on the right side of the page don't do as well.

In addition, ads that are placed next to important editorial
content can really help attract attention to the ads. These
ads perform best when they are truly integrated into the
actual content of the page.

If you are using images within your advertising, keep the
following in mind.

Images receive much more attention if they are larger. For
example, one of the test pages in the Eyetrack III test found
that a postage-stamp sized image was viewed by 10 percent of
the participants while an average sized photo (about 230 pixels
wide and deep) drew the attention of 70 percent of the people.

Their research also showed that clean, clear faces in images
attract more eye attention on homepages. So, if you are
using small images within your advertisements, you may want to
enlarge them a bit if you want people to be drawn to them.

On the other hand, people seem to avoid ads when a visual
barrier is placed between the ad and the content.

These breaks can consist of either white space or a border.

Ads that blend into the look and feel of the page draw the most
attention. In addition, text ads were also found to receive the
most response.

By now, you may be wondering what these studies have shown about
search engines. Exactly what do people look at when they are
presented with a list of search engine results? Well, that is an
excellent question and one that has been studied extensively.

A joint eye tracking study performed by search marketing firms
Enquiro and Did-it and eye tracking firm Eyetools has shown that
the majority of eye activity during a search happens within a
triangle at the top of the search results page.

This area of maximum interest has been referred to as the
"golden triangle". The study showed that the top 5 results
(ones above the fold) received the most exposure.

Here is a chart showing the organic ranking visibility of the
top 10 positions.

Rank 1 – 100%
Rank 2 – 100%
Rank 3 – 100%
Rank 4 – 85%
Rank 5 – 60%
Rank 6 – 50%
Rank 7 – 50%
Rank 8 – 30%
Rank 9 – 30%
Rank 10 – 20%

Side sponsored ads receive significantly less attention. Here is
an overview of the visibility of the side sponsored ads based on
position:

1 – 50%
2 – 40%
3 – 30%
4 – 20%
5 – 10%
6 – 10%
7 – 10%
8 – 10%

This is largely due to an "F" shaped scan pattern in which the
eye tends to travel vertically along the far left side of the
results and then scan to the right occasionally if something
catches its attention.

These statistics show the importance of ranking well and also of
using relevant keywords within your title and description. With
a relevant and interesting title and description, you can
attract more eyeballs within the search engine results.

As always, keep in mind that the information gleaned from these
studies are simply a guide. Nothing can beat your own testing.
If you don't have good content it doesn't matter how good your
layout is.

However, by using some simple layout techniques, you can
influence the path your visitors take within your website.
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Kim Roach is a staff writer and editor for the SiteProNews
(www.sitepronews.com) and SEO-News (www.seo-news.com)
newsletters. You can also find additional tips and news on
webmaster and SEO topics by Kim at the SiteProNews blog
(blog.sitepronews.com/). Kim’s email is: kim @ seo-news.com
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