"Stop Words" - Search Terms that Matter
by Dave Maloney
What are Stop Words? Search engines can't quite think as we do (yet), but they are constantly evolving to figure out what we're searching for and deliver the most relevant results. Stop Words are words that we use so frequently (the, a, in, from, etc) that Google and other search engines consider them unnecessary and ignore them in your search terms.
So if you did a search for "inbound marketing in ma", Google would ignore the word "in" and give you results for "inbound marketing ma." (and hopefully Pagetender shows up there) But, Google is clever enough to understand that if you searched for "The Time Machine," it would consider the word "the" important and not a Stop Word; it would give you results relating to the book by H.G. Wells or its subsequent movies, and not just everything that mentions time machines. Confused yet?
Like everything else forever changing and evolving, here is a list of Stop Words.
Do Stop Words affect your page's SEO? It used to be that stop words in your keyword phrase for a page would be disregarded by search engines, but in their ongoing efforts to bring you the best results, algorithms have changed. Every word counts in your keyword phrases, so make sure you've done your keyword research to come up with the best terms possible to attract the most and right kind of traffic to your page.
For example, if your page is optimized around the phrase "inbound marketing for novices," it will show up in search engine results differently than if you were trying to rank for "inbound marketing novices." Exact phrase matches get the best rankings over partial matches, so always compare your keyword phrase metrics with and without Stop Words, and choose your page titles and headlines with careful consideration.