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STOP WORDS

Certain words, such as “the,” “a”, “if,” “of,” and “with,” are extremely common and don’t provide meaning for search relevancy. Most search engines don’t include them in their index, or database, of web page content. The stop words on your web pages are disregarded, as if those words didn’t exist in the text. Typically, this is a non-issue except when the stop word is crucial to the search – for example – when you are search for Pete Townsend’s band “The Who.”

List of English Stop Words (list, PHP Array, MySQL Stop Words)

Including a lot of stop words in your title tag dilutes the title tag’s keyword density. One thing to consider is whether the stop word in your title tag is relevant. Consider your current tile tag – “The Story of Winnie the Pooh” – is anything lost by dropping the leading “the?” “Story of Winnie the Pooh” conveys the same relevancy.

While we give a tremendous amount of consideration to the verbiage we use and the SEO implications of our choices – we should not lose site of the fact that once SEO does it job, we have real people visiting our site. The verbiage should be readable, the site should be aesthetically pleasing and the content should have value.

What’s the point of doing all that work, to simply have the reader bounce of your site because she doesn’t like your webpage once she got there? And when you’ve got them, you really need to direct them to a desired action. Why have you pulled them to your site? Do you want to sell them something? Do you want them to do something? The call to action must be clear.

In the early days, it was all about design. FLASH, Baby, FLASH! It moved, it was big and bright, it caught our attention – but the web bots couldn’t read it, so it wasn’t searchable and despite having all the bells and whistles – your site didn’t get found. A powerful site is both searchable and pleasing to the eye!

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