You’re likely doing all you can to design your web pages to have all the relevant SEO factors that seem to be required to rank well in your favorite search engines. (At least we hope you are!) But are you designing your pages to get an "F" when looked at by your site visitors? If not, you’re going against what search giants like Google and scores of other research companies are now learning about how humans look and interact with web pages (and print ads, and television commercials, and more!)

Well, to be precise, "eye-tracking" started over 100 years! From Raymond Dodge’s Photochronograph in 1871 to Edmond Huey’s Eye-Tracker in 1898, the science of tracking eye movements is really nothing new. Today, companies like Tobii are creating amazing technology to allow for researchers, both private and academic, to generate useful data on how humans view and even think about the things they see and read on a wide variety of media.

So what, you say? So, when you read an article on The Official Google Blog entitled, "Eye-tracking studies: more than meets the eye" you discover that the leading search engine company has been doing intensive research on how to best layout their SERP’s (Search Engine Results Page) for the most effective delivery of results.

But what is meant by "most effective"? Good question. In the research behind that Google post, they wanted to find out how to best incorporate thumbnail image data to help a searcher find the best answers for what they were searching on. As a result of numerous eye-tracking studies performed they discovered that thumbnails did not effectively change the scanning of a page and in fact, improved a page viewers ability to skip information that did not meet their needs and get to the info that did.

"It showed that we had managed to design a subtle user interface that gives people helpful information without getting in the way of their primary task: finding relevant information."

Yet again, you say "Great. But so what? I use (fill_in_your_favorite search_engine_here)"

Ah, don’t be impatient, friend. If Google has shown that information searchers scan and find relevant information using certain patterns, you can bet that most of the other engine SERPs behave similarly. But don’t miss the bigger point here. All of the SEO, SEM, and PPC, and everything that is happening in your organization to get you ranked higher will benefit you only if you are ending up on that first page of results. And the higher on that page the more likely you are to get visual attention and subsequent click action taking the searcher from the engine to your site.

Jakob Nielsen’s "F-shaped pattern for reading web pages" presents a compelling argument thoroughly supported by the Google eye-tracking studies (and numerous other companies research as well as can be learned here and here.)

As you can see in the image to the right, the "heat map" of how the visitor’s eye scans the page ends up resembling an "F". And while this is the Western way of reading (left to right, top to bottom) similar studies show results that can be followed for non-Western languages.

Okay, back to wanting to be as high on the SERP as possible. Clearly, if your page is one of the top 3 to 4 on the page, you’re much more likely to be seen and clicked on than if you make the first page and are the 10th listing on that page!

Clearly, the stakes are getting higher (or more accurately, we are now discovering just how high they have likely always been!)

If Google and other companies are learning and implementing research such as this into the design of their pages, be they results pages of searches on data, or simply displaying news or collections of images, is there any reason you wouldn’t want to re-think your page designs to take advantage of this science?

Scientific Web Design: 23 Actionable Lessons from Eye-Tracking Studies is a fantastic article that will give you more reasons to design from this perspective than you’ll know what to do with! Some of the  items are a given (even though you may not think about them consciously, you do them, like the rest of us):

1. Readers ignore banners (Uhm, yeah. Unfortunately )
2. Showing numbers as numerals; digits not words (I didn’t realize this one and will have to change my behaviour accordingly)
3. Shorter paragraphs perform better than longer ones (can you say short attention span?)
4. Lists hold reader attention longer (heh, which you’d know if you’ve read this far!)
5. Navigation tools work better when placed at the top of the page (I’d always wondered on this, and now have some definitive data to support that view)

The circular logic presented here is that if you can get your pages ranking in the top results for your targeted keyword, you know you’ll get more traffic to your site. Now you know why that happens. And more importantly, you know how you can use that very "why" to convert those visits into your most desirable actions: click, buy, subscribe, perform.

So, the next time you’re asked what your SEO goals are, tell them

"To get an F, of course!"

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If you’re reading this post, you likely are familiar with blog sites, posts, and the comments left on them. But are you familiar with the software that powers blogs? WordPress, Typepad, Moveable Type, are some of the platforms that drive the largest percentages of blogs on the Internet today. These blogging platforms, and most others have built in commenting capabilities, and why wouldn’t they? The very nature of blogging is basically a two part process: I’ll write and publish this post on our website, and you’ll read and (hopefully!) leave a comment telling the world how much you agree with what I’ve said

Or you’ll disagree with something I or one of the other commentors before you have said. And you’ll enter your comment into the built in form that comes with the blogging application. You then hit "submit" and depending upon how the site owner has things set up, your comment is shown on the site immediately, or just as soon as the administrator approves of your words.

What then is this new added feature known as "Commenting Systems"? If comments are already a part of the platform, why is there a growing number of website owners and administrators that are opting to replace the stock commenting functionality and using these third party commenting systems?

The quick answer is that these sites are hoping to increase readers interactions with blog authors as a result of the commenting systems "social community". Several of the leading commenting systems in the marketplace today are deployed to tens of thousands of websites. Features of the systems include allowing the viewer easy access to statistics of commenters including excerpts of comments they have left on other websites. Not only can a visitor receive more meta data on commentors, they may even choose to head to another site where that registered user has left comments.

And that little aspect is another big reason why many site owners like using commenting systems: they offer the promise of increasing a web site’s incoming traffic. But at the same time, the very mechanism that brings them in, takes visitors away just as quickly! 

So who are some of these commenting systems? Likely the top three: 

• Disqus
• IntenseDebate
• SezWho

For the most part, the systems all work the same. In a nutshell, you read the blog post, and any comments that may have been left prior to your visit, and should you decide, a form that invites you to leave your own comments on the post and/or other comments. All systems are simple, straightforward, and if you have ever left a comment before, you’ll know how to use these new systems.

But what if you are a web site owner or administrator and you’re considering installing and using a commenting system? Should you take the plunge? Well, the first thing you might consider is reading the indepth evaluation on blog comment systems that Scott Jangro wrote up not too long ago. In his article, Scott goes into great detail about the various differences between the systems, and I highly recommend you add the article to your reading list.

Why might you not want to use a commenting system? Well, one of the early arguments agaist using them was the fact that you lost control (read ownership) of the actual data that made up the comments your visitors left on your site. Thankfully, the developers of theses systems, realized this and all have the options to both export and import the content data from and to your websites. Clearly making back ups of all your data is the smart move prior to trying any of these data movements, but I’ve only read a very small number of bad case scenarios concerning data corruption causing a loss of comments, so the numbers are very much on your side, and you’ll experience a high rate of success.

The only real reason you might not want to consider one of these systems is that you’ll be locking yourself into a proprietary system of commenting that won’t interact with any of the other commenting systems. To date, there is no universal system or standard that provides for interactivity between Intense Debate and Disqus. So, if you have decided on Disqus and want to get the attention of the thousands of Intense Debate users, you are pretty much out of luck. Of course you can employ other techniques to bring in traffic to your site, and you should do that regardless. Just realize that until standards are in place, comments whether hosted by your platforms built in system or a third party commenting system will all do pretty much the same thing. It’s just that the size of the commentor pool will definitely be larger. And that just might make it the smartest choice.

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SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday – Can Bad Links Hurt Me? from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo

This post written by Vertical Measures’ team member – James D. Kirk

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