What Do Web Surfers Look At

One of the important considerations in creating a site is trying to figure out where to place important information, and what design elements help readers find content or make it more likely that they will remain on a site and read its content. Although not new, Poynter Extra's eyetrack studies provide a lot of information about how people actually read online content. Through Google Adsense you can find helpful information about where people are most likely to click ads on content pages, forum pages, and weblogs - information which you can use on any site, if you wish to draw reader attention to particular information, links, or features. And this little graphic from WebmasterWorld tells you why coming in within the first four results on a search engine is key to generating traffic. (It can at times be better to come in 11th - being the first listing on a second page of search engine results - than to be in spots six through ten on the first page.)