by iakul

Created on: August 02, 2010   Last Updated: August 04, 2010

In a joint eye tracking study conducted by search marketing firms Enquiro and Did-It.com and eye tracking firm Eyetools in 2005, they tracked eye activity during Google searches. The study concluded that the majority of eye activity was focused near the top of the page, in the shape of a triangle. Thus, the Golden Triangle term was coined to describe this area of eye activity.

What this study did was prove something that webmasters had already known for a long time. There's a world of difference between merely being on a search results page and being ranked at the top of a search result page.

The test was conducted with a pool of 50 people in Eyetools’ eye tracking lab in San Francisco, California and the Golden Triangle area coined by this study starts from the area occupied by the first search result, and rapidly narrows down through the first 4 or 5 search results. By the time the bottom of the page is reached, the Golden Triangle has stabilised to a small area that's constant for the rest of the page. For the number crunchers among you, the visibility is 100% in the top 3 listings, and drops to 85% visibility for the 4th listing. It drops further to 60% visibility in for the 5th listing, 50% visibility for the 6th to 8th listing and by the time it reaches the 9th and 10th listing, visibility has dropped to 20-30%. 72% of searchers clicked on the first link, and only 50% of searchers moved on to the second page of results.

The study while interesting, has, on the whole, been regarded as just that, "something interesting", by SEO experts, since it offered nothing groundbreaking. There were also doubts as to whether a group of 50 was a sufficiently large group sample to form any solid conclusions.

Basically, what the Golden Triangle study tells us is that we should aim to be in the top 3 for search results. If that isn't viable, aim for the next highest position. That's something just about every webmaster is already trying to do and has been trying to do for years before the study was conducted.

Nonetheless, the study has served to prove something, and in the world of SEO, where conflicting views on how to optimise does arise infrequently, it at least serves to prove that we are on the right track.

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