I think we can all agree that the Internet is not as shiny and new as it seemed a decade ago. Arriving on a website is no longer such a unique experience that you have to sacrifice the most valuable piece of real-estate (your top Headline) with “Welcome to Our Website!” Frankly, nobody cares….

If you want to make your visitors welcome, give them what they are looking for; A headline that lets them know they are in the right place.

Depending on personality type, you have 2-8 seconds before they decide to leave your site. There are very few things that you can almost guarantee they will look at during that time; one of them is… the Headline.

Statistically, women will read more than men, older people will read more than younger people, and few people will read your body copy unless they are intrigued by the headline. Heck, even search engines give your headlines (H1 tags) more weight when indexing your site.

Therefore your headline is arguably the most important element of your landing page. Don’t waste it!

Instead of “Welcome to our Website”, how about something interesting that will really welcome them like:

“Who Else Wants a Great Blog Template Design?”

Or…

“Here is a Method that is Helping Bloggers Write Better Post Titles”

Or…

“Get Rid of That Lame Mullet Hairdo Once and For All”

OK, maybe not the best examples off the top of my head, but you get the point. Any one of those headlines trumps the universally lame “Welcome to my Website”.  If you are clever enough to weave a keyword or two into an interesting headline, search engines will be as interested in you as those lucky visitors who found your website.