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A joint study between eye tracking companies Eyetools, Enquiro and Did-it has verified that most searches on Google (and any other engine for that matter) centralize within the “golden triangle.”

The Golden Triangle refers to a systematic eye tracking movement by the person who is looking for information on Google.

(Source: Eyetools, Enquiro and Did-it)

If you refer to the image above, you can clearly see where the “heat” of the search activity lies. It starts at the top left of the results page (organic listings), moves over to the top right of the PPC listings (sponsored listings) and then back to the left to just above the fold. This concentrated area is commonly called the golden triangle and one of the most important aspects of search marketing.

Included in the golden triangle area are the top organic, top sponsored and Google’s alternative results (these often include news, local suggestions and shopping).

It is critical for your website to rank on 1st page of Google results. To gain the most search traffic, you have to aim for top 5 in organic position.

According to the finding from Optify, website ranked No.1 position received 36.4% click-through-rate (CTR), No.2 had 12.5% CTR and No.3 had 9.5%. It’s worth to note that the potential traffic being No.1 in Google is the equivalent to overall potential traffic from No.2 through No.5 position!

(Source: Search Engine Watch)

This is in line with our observation from our clients’ project, where we see the significant surge of traffic when the keywords are ranked No.1 position in Google.

Here is the complete Optify’s CTR finding for Google Top 20:

Based on the above findings, it is very important to focus getting into page 1 as initial target. Then, aim for top 5 position in Google with continuous SEO effort. This is where you will enjoy a good ROI for SEO. Sorry to say that there are little business value being in page 2 or page 3.

Will my emails go into junk boxes?

Well, if you fill them with junk then I’d hope so! Junk filters exist to make our lives easier, protect our computers and weed out malevolent or inappropriate content. However, sometimes perfectly innocent and relevant emails get caught up by the algorithms that decide what’s groovy and what’s not and it can be for all manner of unexpected reasons.

Here’s an example: Say you’ve created an email marketing about a brand new product, a product that’s taken years of development and significant investment to get to this stage. When you’re broadcasting the good news to your clients you NEED to be sure that they receive it without complication, so you do your best to keep the email tidy, succinct and clean. But it hits your junk box.

Ensuring Quality Bulk Email Marketing:

At this stage, there are a number of obvious things you can check for first including:

• Profanity (even innocent words that can potentially be taken the wrong way)
• Excessive use of exclamation points or other punctuation
• Lots of different sizes and colours in your copy
• Oversized or excessive numbers of images
• Hyperlinks to suspicious sites
• Suspect/’salesy’ subject lines

A single, strong instance of any one of the above could be the sole cause of your problem, and should be relatively easy to spot. Unfortunately, in the real world it’s the combined effect of minor SpamBugs here and there (which on their own wouldn’t cause any problems) that causes junking and which therefore makes the testing process ESSENTIAL.

A number of 3^rd party programs/services are available that can ‘rate’ your email for you, giving you an idea of how spammy it’s going to look to various different inboxes. These are fine, but should only be used as a starting point in my experience. We have a mantra here – “TEST, TEST and TEST again” – because there is no substitute. Best practice dictates that you take extra steps to ensure that you’ve done a good job, the right way. I advise you to spend a few minutes visiting major web based email services like Gmail and Hotmail and opening free ‘emailtest@’ accounts; you will find it makes a world of difference to your campaign creation process, and ultimately the results you might achieve.