Getting Links – How To Use Your Hook

I have been experimenting on my site recently with various aspects, ads, content arrangement, links and hooks. For those of you who aren’t sure what I mean when I say hook, I am simply referring to the aspect of your site that draws people back and also helps produce a natural flow of backlinks.
On this site as you can see above I have my free seo tutorials and SEO Services. These are the main ‘hooks’ on my site and the SEO tutorials especially have been a great source of return traffic and one way backlinks. My free seo tutorial page nearly has as many links as my home page!!!
Going off topic slightly but hopefully pulling it together a little later in this post, I want to talk about the new eye tracking research and how it gave me a thought early last week. (if you want to read more about eye tracking research check out usercentric)
Eye tracking research shows you the most viewed parts of your web page and a research result posted on Youmoz recently showed a great take on how users view search results. The research was for the purposes of PPC advertising and display URL’s but look at the hot spots on this search result.

As you can see from the above image the top left of the screen gets some serious viewing time, in fact the top 3 results get the majority of it.

Now from an SEO perspective this tells us the aim is to have our sites in the top 3 – 5 results in order to get the Lion’s share of search traffic, however it also got me thinking about the lay out of my site and how I could use my hooks better.
As I said above my main ‘hooks’ are my free SEO tutorials, they are the ones that people come back to read and they are the ones where the majority of my 100% natural backlinks go to. If these tutorials create return visitors and links it would be only natural to get as much traffic to them as possible.
Last week I placed 2 banners at the top of my page “free seo tutorials” and “SEO services”, I can tell you now that in the last week my traffic on my tutorials page has gone from around 40 unique visitors a day to 150 a day. This is nearly 4 times the visitors to my “sticky” pages

Before this I had my tutorials in my sidebar, which just goes to show how visitors really view your site.

It is too early for me to see any significant link increases but I can definitly vouch for the increase in traffic by having my hooks in bold at the top left of my page, (it also has the added benefit of distracting people from my mug shot )

So to conclude on three points:-

• You need a hook, something people will return to, it is a must for branding, traffic and links
• It needs to be in a prominant position on your page, preferably the top left
• It will not only increase traffic but links also
• The top 5 positions on Google is our real aim