Web users and your customers are not patient enough to read through the whole page of the search engine results. As a general rule of thumb, web users tend to start reading from the top left side of the search engine results page (SERP) and scan through vertically along the left side looking for clues that help them find the most relevant content. Once they have found a clue, they quickly scan through horizontally to see if the content matches the user’s intent. This reading pattern is shaped as the letter F.

Below, is a screenshot using a heat map of a Google results page. As you can see a lot of attention is given to the first four results on Google. You can notice almost a triangle shape that forms from the hottest areas of the page. Is your website in the Triangle?

Another interesting aspect of this image is the significant drop off between the first four and the bottom of the SERP. Unless the web user couldn’t find anything relevant on the top page, the chances of your website getting traffic is very minimal. Studies have shown that it takes about 12 seconds for a web user to scan through and make their first click. Can your customers find you in 12 seconds?

Google has indicated that a new update will be coming soon to penalize websites that “over optimize.” This has caused a bit of anxiety among search engine marketers, but fear not! The intent of this update is to filter out websites that are good at search engine optimization (SEO), but do not provide good content for visitors. It’s frustrating when you search on Google and find results that don’t relate to your search queries. If people are spending less than one second on your website,

Google’s Matt Cutts described the update as a way to “level the playing field” so that good content makes it to the top of the search engine result pages. So who should be worried about this update? Websites that keyword stuff will be hit hard by this update. Keyword stuffing, is an unethical way of SEO by inserting the same keywords all over the content and meta tags. These websites are pretty easy to detect because each sentence will have the same keywords incorporated into it.

Moving forward, SEO will put more emphasis on unique content creation that add value to visitors. If you feel that your website might be hit with this penalty, take the time to review your website. Is your content relevant to the keywords that are ranking well on Google? Look at your meta tags and see if your accurately describing your website to visitors or misleading them?

Now here is an awesome video about birds.

Birds

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