What Are SEO Stop Words?

Google and other big search engines have words or phrases that are considered 'stop words'. When a spider or crawler encounters one of these stop words,they will immediately leave your website and any information they gathered from it will not be saved in their database. In order to speed up their searches and to save disk space, search engines like Google don’t record and never give much importance to stop words. It means that your website will not be indexed. 

In case, if your website is already indexed in a search engine, the crawler will come back to see if there are any updates - and if it finds stop words when it does this, then your site could get banned from the search engine. You will not be allowed to remove the words and re-submit: it's too late.

Definition

Stop words are very common words or adjectives that can hinder your SEO efforts. Words such as, 'of ', 'or', 'the' etc. interfere with your SEO efforts because they use up precious character space, especially when creating web page titles.

An article or content without these stop words goes meaning less and reduces readability, so it’s not to avoid these words in content, but better is to avoid it in your URLs and Titles. A page title should be not more than 70 characters and when you use this stop words in titles it will fill up the character space. Your page title should be concise as well as the use of stop words will reduces the keyword density which have a tiny impact on your search rankings.

A clear focus keyword without these stop words will reach out your audience. Also search engines will know that you have some strong relevant content and gives importance to your site.

Here is an example of how a page title can be adjusted to eliminate stop words and increase keyword density.

Original title:

Official Home Page of the Office of (office name here) at the Illinois Institute of Technology

Change to

(Office name here)  | Illinois Institute Technology

Use of Stop words in URLs: Take this URL as an example www.yoursite.com/category/this-is-how-not-how-to-have-a-url-structure/

This URL has maximum use of stop words and makes it big in length.

Without Stop words in URLs:

So avoid stop words in URLs and make it like this www.yoursite.com/category/good-url-structure/ which is SEO friendly.

List of common stop words

A, is, what, who, how, was, this, that, but, at, be, for, he, she, am, I, in, its, your, with, all, any, did, do, had, has, here, his, and, etc.

Summary:

1- Use your most important keywords at the beginning of the title, meta tags, link texts and body text.

2- Avoid using filter words to increase the effectiveness of your keywords.

3- Make sure that your web pages have the right keyword density and don't contain stop words.

The right keyword mix on your web pages will help you to improve your ranking on all important search engines.