Internet Marketing

Stop words are quite simply words that Search Engines generally do not index to save space in their database and increase the speed at which it can retreive data for search queries. These words are usually extremely common and don’t add anything substantive to the context of your content.

Common stop words are “a”, “of”, “the”, “I”, “it”, “you”, and “and” however it is believed the many search engines will actually include a much more comprehensive list.

So what does this mean to those of us involved in the SEO game. In a nutshell while stop words can’t be eliminated entirely from your title and Hx tags they should be minimized as much as possible. The name of the game in keyword density is to include only enough information thats needed to increase the weight of your targeted keywords or phrases. A stop word is simply diluting your efforts and as you can see won’t provide an ounce of help as the search engines simply ignore them anyway.

Lets take a look at a specific example - imaging the following as a title tag:

Mary had a little lamb who’s fleece was white as snow.

We can identify “had”, “a”, “who’s”, “was” and “as” as stop words in this title. “little” is a suspected stop word as well. A more effective title would be the following:

Mary’s lambs white fleece is like snow.

We have eliminated all but two stop words and as a result have increased our target key word density.

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