Traffic Building

Akami recently released a study that found “Four seconds is the maximum length of time an average online shopper will wait for a Web page to load before potentially abandoning a retail site.”

Although you may not be running a retail site, understanding what your users expect and how they’re likely to evaluate your web site when they visit is critical to keeping them around long enough to see your marketing message.

Think about how you evaluate web pages and how long you’ll search a page looking for the information promised by the search result that brought you there. Chances are you put pages on a pretty short leash. After all, there are tens of thousands of other pages in that search results page just a back button click away.

If the site you’re looking at doesn’t deliver quickly, you simply don’t have enough time to give it a second chance - you just head back to the search results and try the next site in line.

What if you could put your most important content in a spot where most people look first when visiting your web page? That way you could get your message across quickly and hopefully grab the visitor’s interest long enough to keep them on your site to explore the rest of your content.

At www.useit.com, Jakob Nielsen conducted an eye-tracking study and generated several ‘heat maps’ that show the dominant reading patterns of visitors on three different types of websites.

I’ll leave the in-depth study of the results to their website, but one interesting similarity between all three heat maps generated from the study is that a visitor will almost invariably look at the portion of your page to the right of the left navigation column and below the header.

Wouldn’t it make sense to put your most arresting content or message in that spot?

Another interesting tendency is for users to look for visual cues while scanning the page. Looking at the heat maps, you can see that visitor’s eyes fixated on the top left of the content area, on the content at the top right of the page, then jumped to the tops of paragraphs and lists as they scanned down the page.

When writing for the web, it’s important to keep this tendency to scan in mind. Break up your content into several paragraphs and highlight important content by placing it in a list or segregating it from the normal flow of your page. It may be more natural to write a few longer paragraphs instead of many short ones, but you’ll get more of your content absorbed by breaking it up and making it more easily digestible.

Also remember that the typical visitor is only able to read text on a computer screen at around 80% of their normal reading rate for printed text. Considering the extra effort needed to read your content, making it as easily scanned as possible will go a long way toward keeping those visitors around once they find your site.