1. “Dominant headlines most often draw the eye first upon entering the page”
2. “Smaller type encourages focused viewing behavior…. larger type promotes lighter scanning”
3. “a headline has less than a second of a site visitor’s attention”
4. “For headlines — especially longer ones — it would appear that the first couple of words need to be real attention-grabbers”
5. “Navigation placed at the top of a homepage performed best”
6. “Shorter paragraphs performed better in Eyetrack III research than longer ones.”
7. “We found that ads in the top and left portions of a homepage received the most eye fixations”
8. “Size matters. Bigger ads had a better chance of being seen”
9. “Close proximity to popular editorial content really helped ads get seen”
10. “the bigger the image, the more time people took to look at it.”
11. “Our research also shows that clean, clear faces in images attract more eye fixations on homepages”

Original source: poynterextra.org