It’s All about the Eyeballs - What about the Website Itself?
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As I mentioned, many SEOs already know that, when using a search engine to try to pull in visitors to a website, it is better to shoot for an organically high search result rather than pay for sponsored listings. But what happens once the visitors arrive at your website? Will they see your messages? Will they be motivated to click? Will they look at the parts of your website on which you spent so much time and effort to get your point across? Or will they look at the “less important” parts of the page? And, perhaps most important of all, how would you even know?
Here again, Eyetools provides some interesting answers. Because Web pages are often set up so differently from each other, there seems to be no general rule. Looking at case studies can be instructive, however. For example, in his blog, Greg Edwards discusses a test his company ran on an E*Trade website back in early 2001 that illustrates a number of relevant points for SEOs and business owners concerned with what people see (and don’t see) on their websites. Eyetools discovered from the study that the website had “visual dead zones” that visitors did not read. To prove that content posted in those areas might as well not exist, the company then came up with “gibberish” to post in those dead areas.
Not all of it was just gibberish, however. Phrases used included “FDIC distrusts us,” “No Bank Quality,” and “Will Lose Value.” Remember, E*Trade is a financial website; these are the kinds of phrases that should therefore pull even a casual surfer up short. When Eyetools sent the modified page to a number of people and then asked them if there was anything “strange” about the page, only one person in 25 noticed!
This brings home more solidly the point that was made above: if you have content in a dead zone, it might as well not exist. That might not seem like a big deal at first glance, but it can run into a real loss of money from the loss of opportunities.
Next: What Does this Mean for Your Bottom Line? >>
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