F for fast. That’s how users read your precious content. In a few seconds, their eyes move at amazing speeds across your website’s words in a pattern that’s very different from what you learned in school.

In the new eyetracking study, they’ve recorded how 232 users looked at thousands of Web pages. They found that users’ main reading behavior was fairly consistent across many different sites and tasks. This dominant reading pattern looks somewhat like an F and has the following three components:

-Users first read in a horizontal movement, usually across the upper part of the content area. This initial element forms the F’s top bar.
-Next, users move down the page a bit and then read across in a second horizontal movement that typically covers a shorter area than the previous movement. This additional element forms the F’s lower bar.
-Finally, users scan the content’s left side in a vertical movement. Sometimes this is a fairly slow and systematic scan that appears as a solid stripe on an eyetracking heatmap. Other times users move faster, creating a spottier heatmap. This last element forms the F’s stem.

Obviously, users’ scan patterns are not always comprised of exactly three parts. Sometimes users will read across a third part of the content, making the pattern look more like an E than an F. Other times they’ll only read across once, making the pattern look like an inverted L (with the crossbar at the top). Generally, however, reading patterns roughly resemble an F, though the distance between the top and lower bar varies.

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Click Forensics, the company that maintains the Click Fraud Index, a network that monitors and reports on data gathered from more than 3,500 online advertisers and their agencies, has released its most recent quarterly report on click fraud.

The company found that the overall industry average click fraud rate was 14.8 percent for Q1 2007 versus 13.7 percent for the same quarter in 2006 and 14.2 percent for Q4 of 2006, 13.8 percent for Q3 of 2006, 14.1 percent for Q2 of 2006, respectively.

At first glance, these numbers may seem alarming, but they may not take into account the discounting of questionable clicks done by most search engines. In fact, Google has stated that click fraud amounts to just .02% of all clicks after it allows for other non-converting clicks. See Danny’s Google: Click Fraud Is 0.02% Of Clicks for a detailed look at how Google analyzes clicks and why its number of fraudulent clicks is so much lower than that reported by Click Forensics.

Other findings from the Click Forensics report:

-The average click fraud rate of pay-per-click advertisements appearing on search engine content networks was 21.9 percent, versus 19.2 percent for Q4 of 2006.

-The industry average click fraud rate for high-priced search terms was 22.2 percent compared to 20.9 percent in Q4 2006, 20.9 in Q3 2006 and 20.2 in Q2 2006. High-priced terms are defined as terms that cost over $2.00. These high-priced terms often make up the majority of an advertiser’s total spend.

“Click Forensics believes click fraud may be mirroring other kinds of online fraud, such as spam and phishing. As companies step up efforts to fight fraud, so do fraudsters especially when there’s lots of money to be made,” wrote Click Forensics’ Karl Scholz in an email.

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The definition of what is and isn’t search marketing is expanding to include other related disciplines. It began with Web developers moving into SEO. A few years ago, SEOs expanded into paid search. Today, one area that more and more search marketers are moving into is social media marketing.

Social media marketers utilize community-based sites like MySpace, Digg, YouTube and Flickr to get a message out to certain groups, to garner links back to their own sites, or to help manage an online reputation by building more pages that will rank in search results for a company, product, or person’s name.
A Natural Progression from Search to Social Media?

But why does this new practice fall under the realm of search marketers? And does it make sense? Most search marketers see it as a natural progression of services.

“Social media dovetails nicely with natural search,” said Tony Wright, VP of client services at Dexterity Media. “A lot of the skills come from search in linkbuilding, which themselves come from public relations. You have to try to convince someone to link to you.”

Search has always been about much more than on-page optimization, or buying search ads. The space is constantly evolving, and because search marketers are often on the front lines of any new trend, they often are in a position to move into new areas that complement search.

“We’re all online marketers. Just because search is the dominant form of navigating the Web, doesn’t mean that we exclusively work in search. The field is much broader than that,” said Rand Fishkin, CEO of SEOmoz.

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Spotted via Micro Persuasion and Digital Inspiration, Yahoo’s just launched Alpha (in beta version, natch). Both of the aforementioned blogs call Alpha a customized search engine similar to Google Custom Search Engine, but Alpha is really more of a multi-search tool that submits your query to multiple sources and aggregates results from all of them on one page.

By default, Yahoo web search results appear on the left, with drop down boxes on the right providing access to Flickr photos, Yahoo Answers, YouTube, Yahoo News, Wikipedia and Yahoo Sponsored results. You can remove any of these, or add any additional source (thus the customized comparison) provided it has an RSS feed. You can also easily change the layout of your Alpha page.

Rather than a true custom search engine, Alpha looks more like a Yahoo experiment to surface more of its deep content through a single query, similar to Google’s OneBox and Ask’s Smart Answers. I’ve got a request into Yahoo for more information and I’ll post an update when I’ve learned more.

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