The implication of this is not only that users will avoid ads but that they’ll avoid anything that lookslike an ad, even if it’s not an ad. Some heavily styled navigation items may look like banners, so be careful with these elements.

The square banners on the left sidebar of FlashDen are actually not ads: they’re content links. They do look uncomfortably close to ad banners and so may be overlooked by some users.

That said, ads that look like content will get people looking and clicking. This may generate more ad revenue but comes at the cost of your users’ trust, as they click on things they thought were genuine content. Before you go down that path, consider the trade-off: short-term revenue versus long-term trust.

This doesn’t mean you should cram everything in the upper area of the page, just that you should make the best use of that area. Crowding it with content will just make the content inaccessible; when the user sees too much information, they don’t know where to begin looking.

This is most important for the home page, where most new visitors will land. So provide the core essentials there:

1. Name of the website,
2. Value proposition of the website (i.e. what benefit users will get from using it),
3. Navigation for the main sections of the website that are relevant to the user.

However, users’ habits have significantly changed since then. Recent studies prove that users are quite comfortable with scrolling and in some situations they are willing to scroll to the bottom of the page. Many users are more comfortable with scrolling than with a pagination, and for many users the most important information of the page isn’t necessarily placed “above the fold” (which is because of the variety of available display resolutions a quite outdated, deprecated term). So it is a good idea to divide your layout into sections for easy scanning, separating them with a lot of white space.

For further information please take a look at the articles Unfolding the fold (Clicktale), Paging VS Scrolling (Wichita University – SURL), Blasting the Myth of the Fold (Boxes and Arrows).

Eye-tracking heat map of a baby looking directly at us, from the UsableWorld study.

And now the baby is looking at the content. Notice the increase in people looking at the headline and text.

Here’s an eye-tracking study that demonstrates this. We’re instinctively drawn to faces, but if that face is looking somewhere other than at us, we’ll also look in that direction. Take advantage of this phenomenon by drawing your users’ attention to the most important parts of your page or ad.

1. Laptops
2. Intel Core 2 Duo Laptops
3. Latitude XT2

No – That’s not the right answer! Think again… harder… focus… Okay… I’ll give it to you.

These keywords represent where in the sales funnel where I am at the moment. The keywords like “Laptops” , “Dentist” , “Carper Cleaner”, “Web Designer”, “SEO Company” tells me that the people searching for these are in “Browse” mode. They don’t know specifically what you they want. As a marketer, if you focus too much time and attention on them, you will end up wasting a lot of money because they are mostly non-buyers. I would term them as ‘Suspects‘ and not ‘Prospects‘

On the other hand, keywords like “Intel Core 2 Duo Laptops”, “Photoshop Web designer”, “SEO Company London” represents a just ripe audience. The people putting these keywords in the search engine are in “Compare” mode.

They have a slightly better defined idea about what they need and this means they have given more thought to it and hence they are more serious. I would term them as ‘Prospects‘ and not ‘Buyers‘.

In most industries, you will find yourself working with these bunches of keywords and this is where you should focus your time, money and energy. Heck, I would even suggest, your website should only serve people who know what they want but are in ‘Compare‘ mode. Sell them on why you are better.

Finally, keywords like “Latitude XT2″ or anything else with brand name, part numbers, price or narrow geographic location represents a “buy” audience.
They are “Buyers” because they know what they are looking for. It’s low hanging fruit and if you find yourself lucky to get keywords like “Latitude XT2 Repair East London” – by all means pounce on it. Typically, you won’t find a lot of these keywords very easily and when you do, it’s prudent to run specific PPC campaigns and build specific landing pages for each such keyword.

Take a look at your keywords now. Can you identify the “Browse”, “Compare” and “Buy” keywords?