1. Ads in the top and left portions of a page will receive the most eye fixation.
2. Ads placed next to the best content are seen more often.
3. Bigger images get more attention.
4. Clean, clear faces in images attract more eye fixation.
5. Fancy formatting and fonts are ignored.
6. Formatting can draw attention.
7. Headings draw the eye.
8. Initial eye movement focuses on the upper left corner of the page.
9. Large blocks of text are avoided.
10. Lists hold reader attention longer.
11. Navigation tools work better when placed at the top of the page.
12. One-column formats perform better in eye-fixation than multi-column formats.
13. People generally scan lower portions of the page.
14. Readers ignore banners.
15. Shorter paragraphs perform better than long ones.
16. Show numbers as numerals.
17. Text ads were viewed mostly intently of all types tested.
18. Text attracts attention before graphics.
19. Type size influences viewing behavior.
20. Users initially look at the top left and upper portion of the page before moving down and to the right.
21. Users only look at a sub headline if it interests them.
22. Users spend a lot of time looking at buttons and menus.
23. White space is good.

Eyetracking
What you most need to know

Every website has at least 1 web analytics application running, but we rarely utilize it. What we may see are only figures and colourful charts. Data is most useful in decision making when we could fully extract and transform them into understandable information.

Let’s take a look at rangit.com’s site statistics for the month of August 2007. I use the free Google Analytics. Everyone ought to, actually.

1. Visitors Overview



A traffic overview page should exist in all web analytics. It allows you to get to know your site’s traffic and their communication with your site’s structure and design. From here, everyone should be able to delve deeper to diagnose the contrasting visitor subdivisions and examine the influence that produces the quality of average page views, time on site, bounce rates, etc.

2. Countries Overlay



Know the people that you are attracting to your site. Get a clear picture of the visits, page views and quality measures of your site’s progress and achievements by geographic region. The general info gathered on this page is enough to help make several important decisions.

Most websites have advertisements. Knowing the origin of the majority of visitors will help you in getting advertisers. For example, if the majority of visitors are from the US, then it is relevant to sign up advertisers targeting the US market.

Another thing is, if you are a blogger from Singapore and majority of the visitors are from US then it helps to know when to strategically publish your daily articles. For example, 8am in the morning US time, to cater to the lunch break crowd.

3. New vs Returning Visitors



Large crowds of new visitors generally mean that you are pretty good at getting traffic to your site while large crowds of returning visitors would suggest that the site content is engaging enough for visitors to come back.

The result of your effort is in the form of this graph. It indicates the success of your intent. Let’s say you’ve added a lot of related content, links on all your pages at the start of the month and update your site daily. If you hit high on return visits, then it’s good news. Otherwise, keep improving your site. There are always forums where you can get helpful opinions and suggestions. Try DigitalPoint.

4. Language



The language shown in the report is the language configured on their computers. I know from my statistics that 80% of visitors to this site prefer English and differ with others in site usage, and other measurements. Awareness of the language used helps in creating favorable content and fully utilizing your marketing spend. This report complements the countries overlay. Different countries have different populations speaking different languages that present crucial market targeting opportunities.

5. Visits



This is the most basic measure of any website analytics application. It’s the measurement of how well you’ve promoted your site. Here are some examples on the useful stuff you can get out of the visits report.

• You may have changed your keyword purchases and would like to know if it landed you more visitors or not. This report is your answer.
• You may want to know if stopping certain ads would affect your visitors. This report is your answer.
• You may have started a marketing campaign and want to know the effectiveness magnitude. This report is your answer.
• You may have moved moved up in search engine rankings for a particular search term and want to know if it improved your traffic. This report is your answer.

6. Pages / Visit



If you get between 1-2 page views per visit, relax, it’s normal. About 55% of others fall into the same category. If your site has been setup to interact, then you should be getting high page views. Only 2 things will cause high average page views.

• The right visitors.
• Quality, effective, original content.

If your page views are below 1.5 pages per visit, then you fall into the lower portion of the normal population. Low average page views is an indication to focus more time on the 2 factors mentioned.

7. Bounce Rate



The measurement of how many visitors leave after viewing the entrance page. The lower the bounce rate, the higher the quality of the visit. Average bounce rates vary according to websites and any average given would have so much variance it would be meaningless. Move at your own pace, improving it from month to month. 2 things that influences bounce rates.

• Marketing. Whether if the campaign is bringing in the desired visitors or not.
• The landing page. If the visitor enjoys what you have to offer, and you manage to hold their attention with an informative, attractive and user friendly website design, you will have low bounce rates.

8. Browsers / OS



Knowing which browsers and operating systems that your visitors use the most allows you to optimize your site’s technical capabilities to make it more engaging and user friendly which usually leads to higher conversion rates. This report serves as a reminder to make sure that your web site works for that browser.

This site’s visitors use 22 different browsers and 10 different operating systems. I personally check my site on Firefox, IE, Safari and Opera only, since they make up 97.42% out of all visitors. And if you ever want to cross check your website across all other browsers, OS or screen resolutions, you can do so easily at BrowserShots.

9. Screen Resolutions



Looking at my screen resolutions report will tell me that it is time to change my theme. Currently, it’s width is at 780 pixels to accommodate the 800×600 users who now make up only less than 3% of my visitors. As you can see 9 out of the top 10 users have screen resolutions above 1000 pixels wide. I have already found myself a super, duper cool, smashing new theme for myself. I’ll be customizing it this weekend and hope to roll it out by next week. =)

10. Connection Speeds



From the report, I know that around 3% of my visitors are on dial up. About 60% are on cable and DSL, which means that it is alright to have media running around without thinking too much. If you noticed, most of my articles are accompanied by visuals and each image averages to about 65kB. For broadband users, especially cable, it’s like taking a walk in the park.

However, if a majority of your users are made up of dial up, try minimizing images and keep your main content as text rich as possible.

11. Traffic Overview



The traffic trends report. Get an overview of your site’s performance here.

• Direct traffic comes from typing the URL into the browser or clicking on the browser’s bookmark. As long as it comes from the person itself and not from any other site, it’s considered direct traffic.
• Referring sites are visitors who came upon your site from another site. As long as it is not direct nor from a search engine, then it is considered referred.
• Search engine traffic consist of visitors who came from the search engine result page.

12. Direct Traffic



This type of website traffic could be potential customers looking for you because they heard of your site from a discussion forum, saw your ad somewhere offline in print or on television, or they might have found you by directly typing in your web site address. A good web site statistical application should allow you to pit direct traffic over city, visitor type, etc. Traffic of this type spend more time on the site if compared against other types. If you have offline campaigns running, high percentage of direct traffic is an indicator of success.

13. Referral Traffic



Visitors coming from other websites. This is about the quantity of links to your site. To me, referral traffic is the 2nd hardest type of traffic to get because it is influenced 100% by the quality of the content on your web site. If it is interesting, cool, attractive, original then you’ll naturally get link love. Recycling material will most often lead a person away to the source.

The 2 direct benefits of referral traffic is that it heightens the awareness of the existence of your website and it also increases the value of the site. Directly. Moreover, you will definitely receive a regular source of traffic from this type of traffic.

There are so many ways to push up this type of traffic but the most importantly, as I have said before is the content. Traffic maketh not the website, but website maketh the traffic. Here are some examples to bolster your site’s referral percentage.

Try building relationships. Leave constructive comments around blogs and forums that you enjoy visiting. Write more than 10 words. For example, a constructive comment at the bottom of this article may sound like, ‘Holy shit, Chris! Your suggestions and ideas and explanations are extraordinarily profound. The part I like best is about referral traffic. Everyone who owns a website should read this piece of yours’. =P

You can even write articles for others. Be a guest blogger in other blogs. As long as your guest article rocks, your referral traffic will rock too.

14. Search Engine Traffic aka. Organic Traffic



The most important and hardest type of traffic. This determines whether if you have a successfully sociable or a lonely website. It’s a BIG deal to get naturally motivated high search engine traffic. It is necessary for any website that intends to generate sales or be noticed. Everyone who uses the internet uses search engines, as they are the tools that provide you what you are looking for. Always aim for the high search engine rankings, like getting on the first page, which will eventually bring up your search engine traffic because too few look past the first page.

Search engine listings are the best as they are the most relevant and free at the same time. As a result they are the most beneficial in 4 ways.

• You get stable, steady, constant, regular traffic.
• Pay nuts. Save on advertising. Build dollar note mountains in your room.
• Get targeted traffic. Visitors get what they are looking for from you. You become of value to the search society.
• More sales = more profits. More profits = more dollar note mountains.

And nothing else will bring you the desired result except by understanding and applying these 2 rules of thumb.

• Unduplicated, unique content is king.
• SEO techniques that are solid, white hat and full of quality. I promise you will be 35 steps ahead of others if you follow these 35 simple SEO directions carefully.

15. Keywords



As you can see, above are the top 10 keywords that brought in organic traffic to rangit.com in August 2007. Go ahead and try it. Enter any of the keywords above into the search engine and tell me what you find. =) And that, my friends, is an example of a successful organic traffic keyword listing done by simply applying the 2 rules of thumb above.

As of writing, I know my article is better than any of the top 10 listed. However, a good website statistical software should be able to allow anyone to segment search traffic by search engine or any other factor. A better one, like Google Analytics, even allows me to segment referrals from a particular keyword by city and visitor type.

This report acts as an indicator of success to your site’s search engine rankings for the keywords listed. If your site is small, don’t look at the percentage of visitors. Instead, look at the number of visitors coming in for each keyword. It’s clearer and you can pick up the patterns faster. Of course, if the site is huge and there are thousands of visitors, only then it is relevant to look at the percentage of visits.

16. Content



Above is a report of the top 10 titles that were most responsible for driving pageviews in August 2007. I can also see the time spent on page, bounce rate and % exit. I’m glad to see some 3-4 minutes average along with one 6 minute average. It shows how well that particular article has done. Overall, I’m happy with the attractiveness of my site.

Ask anyone what they expect from their own website and their response would be to attract visitors. Of course it doesn’t come easy. A lot of time and effort is needed to shape and deliver valuable information for the pleasure of others. Oh yeah and good content is defined by :

• Uniqueness
• Structure of point delivery
• Quality of grammar, punctuation and spelling
• Readability

The idea is to keep a balance between what the readers want, what the search engines think they need and what they really need.

Have fun!

There are many things that you can do to optimize your website for better ranking in search engines. Below are a list of things that anyone can do to rank better. I’d like to imagine search engines using a point system to govern the billions of websites in the universe, giving points for elements and keywords that will help in bringing the most relevant results to searchers. I’ve divided the list into 3 different categories, for better understanding of the importance that each item brings. Important, quite important and very important.

Very Important



Keywords in < title > tag

Imagine walking down a street with dozens of shops on the left and right, each with a name at the top, wanting to buy a table lamp. The street is busy and as you walk down further, you see a shop with the name of ‘Lights & Lamps’. You walk in, buy that table lamp you’ve been searching for and walk out. Little did you know, the shop next door also sells table lamps but with a cheaper price. You didn’t notice it cause it’s name was ‘Mr Chee’. It’s name sounded more like a restaurant than an electrical store.

Shop = your site
Signboard = < title > tag

Keywords in URL

http:// rangit.com / keywords-in-URL /

Directory names can help rankings in Google even if competition is competitive although keyword stuffing in URL may contribute to the site being flagged as spam. If the content is of quality and it matches, you’ll have full points for it.

Keyword density in content

Keyword density is the ratio of the word that is being searched for against the total number of words appearing on a given web page. A naturally written document contains a keyword density of at most 10%. It’s one of the simplest way of gaining points in search engine rankings. Chris did it.

Keywords in anchor text

The anchor text of inbound links can be a decisive factor when going after top ranking on extremely competitive search terms. John Chow displayed the power of anchor test when he lured anchor text in the form of contests, though linking for prizes is considered a violation of Google’s terms and conditions.

Keywords in headings

There are six levels of headings from < h1 > (the most important) to < h6 > (the least important). User agents may use headings to construct a table of contents for a document automatically. If the content is of quality and relevance, you’ll have full points for it.

PR of inbound links

In the world of Google, the higher your PR the higher your reputation. Getting an inbound link from a high ranking site will certainly give more value to the inbound link.

Site similarity of inbound links

A hundred related sites linking to yours is more valuable then a thousand unrelated sites. Full points is awarded for relevance and and similarity.

.edu and .gov inbound links

Both top level domains are not sold to the public, hence the value. They don’t expire, are trusted and an inbound link carries much more weight than any other.

Quantity of inbound links

The more the better. It’s like voting. 1 link = 1 vote. All legitimate ones are counted and weighted against link popularity and originating context.

Site accessibility

Just think like a website visitor and your best selling layout is generated in your mind. Improvements include checking browser compatibility, reducing password protected areas, 404 errors and broken links. Getting more pages successfully indexed will earn a site full points in this area.

Another fundamental issue, which that is often neglected. If the site (or separate pages) is unaccessible because of broken links, 404 errors, password-protected areas and other similar reasons, then the site simply can’t be indexed.

Unique content

Content is king. Wrong.

Unique, high-quality, unduplicated content is king!

Regular content changes

Frequency of content updating in blogs and websites are becoming of more value to Google than it used to be. The more frequent the content, the more likely others are going to visit your site and find articles that they want to link to, which in turn provides leverage in SERPs. I personally regard frequent content updating as the BEST marketing tool you can ever have in today’s web.




Quite Important



The first in line

The heading should contain the most important keyword. Followed by a paragraph containing all the important keywords. Logic being the higher up the keyword, the more important it should be.

Keywords in < alt > tags

< alt > tags are considered by all 4 major engines. Use them to describe images. Put appropriate keywords in them as long as they actually describe the picture.

Anchor text of internal links

Internal links are hyperlinks that join the documents in the website. This is assuming you have more than one page which should be the case if you are serious about optimizing your site. As you have direct control over these internal links this is the place to start using the keywords that you are targeting in the anchor text.

Around the anchor text

Search engines pay attention to all of the text around a link as key words and descriptions to further indicate the relevance of the link. The text around it is also used to determine the nature of the link, whether if it is artificial or natural.

Age of inbound links

Think of it as wine. Also, gaining links consistently will certainly appear natural to search engines. A sudden spike in links will certainly alert them.

Links from directories

Certainly a boost in rankings. However, the most boosts will come mostly from huge directories like dmoz.org, yahoo directory, or about.com.

Age of document

Recent and regularly updated documents gain points from search engines.

Sitemap

Gain favor with search engine spiders. Every website should have one. Here’s a suggestion. Try this sitemap generator.

Site size

The bigger, the better. Also, take user friendliness and ease of navigation into consideration as it grows.

Site age

The older the site is, the more recognized and regarded it will be. Trust points are awarded to respected and established sites, for they indicate the notion that they have been around and are here to stay.

Site theme

This is an area that matters a lot as it promotes the ranking of pages that are related to the theme. The theme ‘because you value your mind‘ is one example of low theme/content relevance.




Important



Keywords in < description > and < keywords > metatags

Since the search engines use a wide variety of factors to determine site rankings, optimizing a page to rank high is a cumulative effort. You should use everything available to you that the engines might give some weight, and therefore you should certainly use < Description > and < Keywords > metatags along with every other legitimate, acceptable technique available. At best, it may help boost your site a bit in those engines that still read them.

Keyword phrases & adjacency

The gap between 2 keywords is best when close to each other. Imagine ‘heart surgery’ in the first paragrgaph compared to ‘heart’ in the 1st sentence and ’surgery’ in the 10th sentence. Keyword phrases stand a better chance when it is popular like ‘free online dating’ or ‘make money online’.

Secondary keywords

Rank better for targeted traffic. Imagine battling with hundreds of thousands of others for ‘plastic surgery’ compared to a handful for ‘plastic surgery manchester city’.

Misspelled keywords, Word stemming and Plural keywords

Sometimes misspelled keywords can represent a very high number of searches. Obviously, you don’t want to have misspelled words be visible on your page, however, it is a good idea to include them in your keywords meta tag.

Word stemming refers to the use of root words as synonyms for other words. For example, the word “climb” will be treated the same as “climbing”. Most search engines use word stemming, but in many cases the search results will vary. It is best to add the most commonly used versions of each word.

You will also find different results when searching for singular and plural keywords. It is best to include both.

Synonyms

Search engines do take into account synonyms of targeted keywords besides the main ones. The site get points from search engines when ranking and relevancy is calculated.

Total outgoing links from the page that links to your site

Scarcity brings value. Imagine an ice cream sale everyday and an ice cream sale once a month. The less outgoing links that the site has, the more value it brings to your site.

Named anchors

Using named anchors where appropriate improves keyword relevancy. When links are in the form < a href="/keyword.aspx#keyword" >, then keyword targeting is improved.

IP address of inbound link

MSN and Yahoo! may not take into account inbound links that originate from the same IP classes. However, Google takes all inbound link IP classes into account.

Page size

A page size of < 40KB gains more favor than a page size of > 100KB.

Location of files

The nearer a file is to the root directory, the better it ranks. Imagine comparing it against another file that is stored in the 5th layer of the tree.

Domains and Subdomains

The domain name http://rangit.com is definitely given more points by search engines compared to the subdomain of http://rangit.wordpress.com

Hyphens in URL

An underscore ‘_’ is not considered as a divider by Google.
Only hyphens ‘-’ are.