Web Surfing and Short Attention Spans
When visitors come to your site you have only a few seconds to engage them or lose them. This is especially true when they come from a search engine or from sites that encourage channel surfing, like Stumbleupon. This is why optimizing the above the fold portion of your blog is so important.
How People Read Online
Jakob Nielsen shows us that web users follow an “F” pattern when they read through a page. They read across the first couple of lines (or short paragraphs) of content, and then they just scan down the left side of the page (hence, the “F” pattern):
Google’s depiction of the page sections that generate higher Adsense click-through rates seems to validate these findings.
Both studies imply that the above the fold section of a page receives the highest attention.
Our Top 5 Above-the-Fold Blog Optimization Tips:
- Minimize distractions: use a two column layout instead of three columns, with your content to the left and the sidebar to the right.
- Make your post headlines powerful and relevant (the headline of your most current post is the first thing your visitors will notice). If most of your visitors come from search engines, make your headlines descriptive and keyword focused. If, on the other hand, most of your traffic comes from social media sites, make the headline intriguing and catchy (try using these very effective headline templates).
- Make your paragraphs short, and separate them with descriptive sub-headings. Since users will be scanning down the page, you want your sub-headings to catch their attention.
- Use the top of the right sidebar to place your most important call to action. For most blogs this means to get visitors to subscribe. Give your visitors at least these three options:
- Subscribe to your RSS feed.
- Subscribe by Email. (RSS services like Feedburner offer the option of sending your feeds to an email address).
- Bookmark you site (you can use a one-stop-shop bookmark button to avoid cluttering your site with lots of different chicklets).
- Immediately above the place where your content starts, include a prominent link saying something like: “New to our site? Read this first” and hyperlink it to a welcome page where you:
- Briefly introduce yourself.
- Offer links to your most popular or most relevant posts by category (this will be easier once your site has a decent amount of content).
- An invitation to subscribe (again, include all the options: email, RSS, and bookmarks).
- A way to contact you: you can use a short contact form or offer your email address. Optionally you can also display your IM ID or skype number, and include links to your different social media profile pages (digg, technorati, delicious, etc.)
Much the interesting has found here