It’s tempting isn’t it? After all good manners cost nothing and a little politeness goes a long way. But before you title the main page of your website “Welcome to our website” have a look at all the competing (in a polite way of course) websites. I’ve just done a google search for “intitle:welcome to our website” google returns about 11,400,000 results. Now that’s a lot of competition for the most polite website on the web.

But maybe, or more probably, you haven’t invested in a website to gain respect as the most polite website on the web. Probably you’ve got a product or service that you want people to know about and to purchase.

Think about what people are likely to type into google to find the products or services you offer. I’ll hazard a guess here that none of them will search for “welcome to our website”. For example, if someone is looking for blue widgets they’ll search for “blue widgets” or “blue widgets in X” where X is a geographical location.

When Google indexes your websites’ pages it looks for clues to tell it what your website is all about. The various parts of your webpage, titles, descriptions, headings, text, and captions, bold text, links, all carry different weights with Google. So if “blue widgets” is mentioned in most of them then Google can be pretty sure what your website is about and will index it accordingly.

The page titles and descriptions sometimes have to perform double duty; as well as helping to tell Google what your webpage is about they are often displayed in the search results pages. With this in mind your page titles and description have to work like mini advertisements enticing visitors to click on the link to your website.

I recently completed a website for a local trader who’d decided to start promoting his service on the web. Checking Google for competitors I found 4 in a 10 mile radius. Looking at their websites I was pleased to find all of them had missed the chance with their page titles and descriptions, and one of them, the holy grail of poor search engine optimisation, was titled “Welcome to our website”. This is going to be easy. Needless to say my client is very happy occupying the first 5 results on Google’s search results page and has reported a good number of visitors converting into customers.

Of course some when his competitors are going to wake up and wonder what happened, but by then he’ll have probably won a good number of new customers. But until then we’ll watch his competitors and make any changes needed to keep one step ahead of them.

So drop the pleasantries for the moment and shout about what you do and where you do it. Use your page titles, descriptions and headings wisely. Let your competitor pick up the most polite website on the web award, while you concentrate of winning new business.