Arguably, you have just 10 seconds to grab your visitors' attention. That doesn't seem long, but as brain can absorb thousands and thousands bits of information per second...10 seconds is long enough to get your message across!

The "above fold" part of a web page (especially of home page) is most valuable real estate you have on your web site.

The first fold of your web site needs to communicate biggest benefit you have to offer your visitors. This is often referred to as your Unique Selling Point or "USP". However, 7 out of 10 web sites are poorly designed above fold. Here are 4 top pitfalls that drive visitor's away.

1. Flashing banners

2. Too many links

3. No clear USP

4. Time consuming flash animation

So what should you do to capture attention of your visitor? Here are things you should include above fold.

1. Spell out your USP Answer visitor's biggest question, "what's in it for me?" Use a main headline and supplement it with a secondary headline. Communicate benefits, benefits and more benefits to visitor. You should use a H1 or H2 tag for main headline and H3 for supplementary headline.

Is your USP to save visitor money? Offer a guarantee? Make live easier? Help visitor to earn an income? When you are working out your USP and benefits...remember difference bewteen "benefits" and "features." If you have a product that is reliable - that is a feature. The benefit would be peace of mind or lower maintainence cost.

Your website statistics hold key for understanding your traffic, improving sales and increasing overall effectiveness of your online selling. Whether you realize it or not, your website has 'critical numbers' that enable you to measure overall success of your Internet presence.

Any serious website operator should understand four most important numbers: Hits; Unique, Targeted Visitors; Leads; Sales.

Hits - Hits are typically page views, whether by same or different visitors, and indicate overall activity on site.

A lot of hits shows activity (usually a good thing), but doesn't necessarily mean you've had a high number of visitors. Search engine 'spiders' and surfers hitting their back buttons also up hit count.

Research has shown that, depending on size of your site, ratio of hits to visitors will range anywhere from 2 to 1 all way up to 12 to 1.

Unique, Targeted Visitors - people surfing to your site who have not been there before within a certain period of time. Depending on statistics program you use, a unique visitor may be someone who hasn't been to your site in a day or a week, while in other programs a visitor remains unique until you reset stats.