How To Create A Captivating Welcome Text?
You’d never get a second chance to make a first impression. Your website is just like your brick and mortar office and wouldn’t want your user to get lost in a maze of inexplicable tech jargon. Keep it nice and clean, but make sure your point is graspable right at the first go. Never give away information like a news reader – all cramped into a single line. You’d never give the impression that you’re trying to sell something, which is very important. If you don’t look like you want to “sell”, you can’t expect people to “buy” from you, unless of course you have a hard core news site. Don’t stretch the matter unnecessarily either. It’s better to have a short and captivating web copy rather than a thousand word literary masterpiece. Maintaining a good balance of information, literary essence, sales talk and teasers is very necessary.
Figure out a way to get into the minds of your readers and find out what they want. Successful selling is all about selling the way a user wants to buy and not the other way round. Put in some sales talk in your content. This will explain the benefits your features are going to offer to the customer. Don’t go overboard; you’d end up sounding spammy.
Never make the mistake of incorporating “about us” content in the welcome text. The most important question in the users’ mind is “what can you do for me?” or “how can you help me?” Try to address that. If you’re not sure how to do that better ask them. Does your welcome text efficiently explain how you can save the environment; how you can help people loose weight or whatever business you’re up to? Let that take the center stage of your welcome page so that users know right away that you’re there to help them. A well written copy often maniu
Speak the same language – A website selling executive ties cannot have the same language as one selling marijuana. Know your users and find out if they like an edgy, warm, friendly or corporate tone. The welcome text is a bridge connecting users with the organization. Make sure you speak the same tongue to connect better. It’s even better if you can use the same lingo as your users. An Aussie for example would say “Hi Mike”, rather than “Hi buddy”.
Every Word Counts – Get down straight to the subject. Do not waste words on welcome messages and self introduction. A typical visitor usually spends around five seconds to judge a site. Make sure your words are well spent and are compelling enough to impress the visitor within the first five seconds.

Use of Canonical URLs in Drupal to help SEO

When you have a block of content having multiple copies and living on multiple URLs you’re bringing down your SEO score. In such cases the search engines will select the “best” version if the content in search results. The rest of the copies will not only be filtered out but might even be dropped from search indexes.
Some of the problems the webmasters would face would include:

• Split Authority – According to the search engines web-authority is synonymous to the number of relevant link backs the site has. With multiple copies of the same content present out there, the links from other sites would get split, bringing down SEO score. All links pointing to the same singular page is considered safe.
• Irrelevant search results – You might not always have the desired results displayed on the search results page. The engines would often display the page of your blog having maximum link backs rather than the one having the most relevant content. This makes it hard for the user to locate the information he’s looking for and he hits the “back” button.
• The engines will use only so much bandwidth to crawl all pages in your site and the whole site might not get indexed. If the bandwidth is spent on indexing copies, pages with valuable information might be dropped out. That means you wouldn’t see those pages in search results.

Canonical URL
All major search engines including Google, Yahoo, Aol, MSN etc. now support a new tag called Canonical URL Tag. This new tag will allow you to specify which page you want the search engines to index and display when it needs to apply a filter.
This tag is nothing but a piece of code that you can place in the page header. Here’s the code
<link rel="canonical" href="http://yoursite.com/whatever-your-URL-looks-like"/>
Drupal users can install Joost deValk’s Canonical URL module and you can manage this information easily through the CMS. This however is only a patched version. We at Drupal USA offer the full version with our standard SEO package.