"A How-To-Do-SEO" and Increase Traffic Book
What are Stopwords?
Stop words are common words, like a, an, the, etc. that most Search Engines ignore because they don’t increase a keyword phases value. Search Engines typically remove stop words from a query because these stop words prohibit a keyword phrase to return the most relevant result.
If the search engine removes them, what’s the problem? For website content and Meta tags, search engines don’t remove the stop words
In some cases the stop word has achieved so much density that they overshadow the keywords.
Believe it or not, stop words can results in over 60 percent of a webpage’s content. That indicates that only 40 percent of the keywords drive search engine traffic to your website. This can be true for Meta tags as well as website content.
Let’s look at an example to show you how to remove stop words from a Meta tag.
The keyword phrases that we want to use are:
New cars, Used Cars, Sales, pre-owned, Massachusetts
A typical Meta tag could be:
Jims Garage in Mendon Mass sells New and Used Cars at Prices that are far below the other car dealers in the Boston
This is 115 characters with spaces.
Now, let’s remove the stop words and look at what we have in the Title Meta tag.
Jims Garage| Mendon Mass| New & Used Cars| Prices far below car dealers-Boston
78 characters with spaces
The Title tag is shorter (words and spaces) than the original one by 37 words. Approximately 32 percent of words in the title tag were stop words. This indicates that 32 percent of the title tag is not important to the search engine.
All of this will help and make your Meta tags, website content, and other material run faster and may help drive more search engine traffic to your website.
Photo:
http://www.prlog.org/
