Web and Graphic Design HQ

Here’s our first tip for you — a simple one, but often ignored!

So, without any stalling, here are the two words NOT to include: “Welcome to…”

Why shouldn’t you use “welcome to” in your page title? Here’s two reasons…

When a visitor adds your site to their favorites/bookmarks — the “Welcome to” will appear at the start of the bookmark. They will do one of two things when creating that bookmark — either leave the wording as it is at the start of the entry, or manually edit or delete it. If they leave it there, it poses two problems:

1. If the visitor’s bookmarks are sorted alphabetically, no matter what your company name or product name, you’ll be filed in their list of sites under “W”! And that’s only 4 letters from the end of the A-Z list!
2. There are only a limited number of letters/numbers displayed, so having “Welcome to ” wastes 11 characters of room — that’s important screen “real estate” you don’t want to throw away! That could be 20 to 25 percent of the available space… and there are more important words to be indexed visually in the list of bookmarks/favorites.

How do I know this is still overlooked quite frequently? If you type in the exact phrase “welcome to” in Google, you’ll get over 518 MILLION matches — so it happens a LOT!

Just as a comparison, searching Google on the term “God” results in 363 million pages — so “welcome to” is certainly more prevalent than it should be!

Your title is important for both search engine indexing and bookmarking — so make sure it is relevant to the visitor. From a “bookmark” perspective — the visitor might not see the bookmark again for several weeks or months — so it’s worth spending a little time to ensure you give consideration to your “title” tag!

One useful add-on to Wordpress which we use is called Optimal Title. This plugin goes one step further. In the regular Wordpress environment, your title is generally made up of two components: your blog name and your post or page title.

Eg, this page’s title would usually be:

Web and Graphic Design HQ > Two Words To Leave Out Of Page Titles

However, Optimal Title reverses the sequence, so the page title comes first. If you bookmark 3 pages off this website, they then won’t all start with “Web and Graphic Design HQ” — but instead, the post/page title — which is much more sensible!

So, if you use Wordpress, make sure you use this plugin! If you’re not, see if you can get your page worked out so the title appears in this kind of format.