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I wonder what letter of the alphabet visitors to your website trace with their eyes when reading the words on your web page.

If you have got it right then it is a letter F as this provides a rough guide to how people read website pages, not just your site but also search engines, news services and other types of sites.

The leading website researching user actions on the internet is that by Jakob Nielsen and he has long stressed the importance of thinking about the placement of key content on a website.

Eyetracking visualizations show that users often read Web pages in an F-shaped pattern: two horizontal stripes followed by a vertical stripe.

via F-Shaped Pattern For Reading Web Content

What the research found can be seen in the image above, you can clearly see where readers tend to focus their eyes when viewing a web page.

The red areas are where people focus the most, followed in order of importance by yellow, blue and finally grey areas, which didn’t attract any attention at all.

In each of the example web pages, the shape of a letter F can be seen.

So what is important for your own website is that the key services you offer are easy to focus upon in these areas of your site, don't expect people to spend time looking around trying to work out what you supply.

The attention span of website readers is very short so you have to quickly get your information in front of their eyes, and if you know where they will first focus upon then that's half the battle.