Yes, it is in our blood to be polite. It's in our blood when we design a website and also when we optimize it for Google. And sometimes politeness boils so strongly in our veins that we find it difficult to place keywords correctly.
More than any other people, we know Politeness demands that one greet one's honored visitors appropriately. This is true in the privacy of your own home and of course also on your own website. And that's why we put in the URL, in the h1 headings and in the title tag the slogan
"Welcome to our website"
This creates a classic example of a wasted keyword placement.
Incidentally, Google currently delivers around 61,900,000 results for the search for ’Herzlich willkommen’ ;-) If you want to optimize for these keywords, then “Herzlich” and “Willkommen” are placed exactly where they catch the user's eye at first blink.
All others, however, who do not belong to the “particularly friendly and polite websites” sector, often commit the following with hearty welcome greetings classic SEO mistakes.
Let's take a polite hairdresser who wants his new barber shop to be found under the name “Barberie Basel”. He would be advised to give his welcome speech in the salon. Google, on the other hand, has rules on how to place keywords correctly in order to be found by the right customers and readers at the right time.
So the attentive greeting is emblazoned at the top of the tab - however the customer came to open the tab, no one knows for sure. Least of all Google. But there it is: "Welcome". When in doubt, does the customer know which page they are on? Am I being greeted by a hair salon or the Queen of England? He probably doesn't know. That's why the page title should always include the keyword for which the page is to be optimized.
By the way: Always optimize a keyword for only one page. If several pages are optimized for the same keyword, it can happen that the pages cannibalize each other. That is. They devalue each other.
Politeness is important. The only problem is that the algorithms of the Google Bot (which scours the web pages and rates them according to relevance) are still in their infancy when it comes to politeness. Google is still focusing on the semantic and lexical subtleties of a web page. A signal that shows Google that it is really about a hairdresser, when someone searches for hairdresser is still to place the search term in the first paragraphs of an article.
The URL coiffeur.ch/herzlich-willkommen may be considered less relevant by Google than the URL coiffeur.ch/ihr-haarschnitt. Why? Because Google's algorithm knows that welcome-greetings is also appropriate for an insurance company. And haircut is classified by the bot as relevant for a hairdresser.
As every SEO knows, the relevant keyword still belongs in the meta description. “Welcome to the page for my super-genius hairdressing salon” - This would be an example of a lovingly placed sentence, which unerringly gives away the most important keywords in the most important places.
The customer is greeted in the H1 headline and thanked for finding the website in the H2 headline. Unfortunately, the customer does not search for “welcome” or “thank you” in the search engine. At least not if they want to make use of a service. The H1 tag in particular must send a clear signal to the searcher: “Here is the answer to your question or the service you are looking for”. And this signal is sent by the appropriate keywords. It is self-explanatory that an H1 headline may therefore only appear once per page.
Important keywords can also be placed in the alt text of media files. If you can't get away from politeness, here's a little tip: The text “Your hairdresser in Basel is looking forward to your visit” can be more effective with a friendly face than “We look forward to your visit”.
The customs and rules of conduct in Switzerland cannot be transferred 1:1 to the Word Wide Web. The politeness is useful if you want to be recommended by customers. It has (so far) little influence on Google ranking.
Michael Salzer
WordPress professional, Apple fan and irregular jogger.
