How to use Heatmaps to Optimize your website

Heatmaps help you to visualize where your user clicks and where they are looking at which helps you to understand what are active region of the page where you can place your call to action components. The activity is shown by color distribution, normally red being the 

Here is a how a typical heatmap looks like -

How to use heatmaps

99% of the time, you want to use 3rd party heatmap software instead of rolling out your own solutions. You can use sites like crazyegg, clicktale or clickdensity http://www.clickdensity.com/ to create heatmaps. For this, you need to install the javascript code which tracks all the clicks and user activity on installed pages and then at the host site these clicks are shown in a nice visual way as shown above. 

What information you can get from heatmap for your site

1. Which areas of the sites visitors are clicking most.
2. Which are most visible areas to the site visitors.

1. Put your call to action buttons at those areas where user is clicking most. This often is also the most visible part of the website.
2. If the lower parts of the sites are not seeing enough visibilty, you probably want to put improtant content above the fold.
3. You can put lesser important content to those areas which are not having enough visibility.

1. ClickTale - Clicktale offers more advanced and costly solutions for heatmaps which are also integrated with other solutions.
2. CrazyEgg - CrazyEgg offers yearly plan which costs $9/month and is ideal for webmasters and people who are looking for quick heatmap data.
3. ClickDensity - they have upto 5000 visits free though I am not sure how active the site is currently.