SEO Step By Step Guide – 121. Understanding Stop Words

There are number of controversies associated with stop words. Some say that the concept of stop words is a myth while others say that it is not a myth but it is no more relevant. At the same time, there are SEO professionals that say that stop words are real and they affect our SEO in case you fail to take this factor in your SEO.

Our approach always should be that even if we make a mistake, it should be on the safer side. There is no point in engaging in an argument whether stop words or real or not if we cannot come to a conclusion after reasonable investigation. The best way to deal with it would be consider it real and take all the necessary precautions so that our website does not suffer any damage even if this concept is to be true.

Let us first try to understand what stop words are. These are words that we use in our web content that are frequently repeated. Search engines omit these words while indexing in order to save disk space and to enhance the rate of indexing. This should immediately ring a bell in our mind. This should then affect our keyword density. If search engines omit stop words then the way they calculate the keyword density will be affected for all obvious reasons.

Some SEO professionals put the stop words to good use. When we analyze the keywords for our website we will come up with some difficult combination to work with while writing the content for our website. They make our website content read awkward. To avoid such clumsy and awkward text in our websites SEO copywriters use stop words either intentionally or unintentionally to make the text more readable. For example, is the keyword that is under consideration is “SEO company India” it is difficult to work with this keyword. We cannot say, “We are a reliable SEO company India.” This will read awkward to make it more readable we can use “We are a reliable SEO company in India.” Here the preposition “in” is a stop word. Search engines will skip this stop word and read the text as “SEO company India”. Not all SEO professionals take this path but they continue to insert clumsy keyword phrases in to the text.

We need to closely observe the search results to see how the search results are affected and in what contexts the stop words make a big difference. The rule of thumb however with regard to keywords is keep them as close and as intact as possible to the suggested keyword so that you can get the maximum benefit out of it. Once a doubt is raised never let it pass until you come to a clear conclusion on how you would like to deal with the issue using the information available at hand.

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