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    What are Stop words in SEO?

    What are Stop words in SEO?

    Stop words are the common words like “a, an, of, the” that are being partially or completely ignored by the search engines to avoid dubiety and server load. However, one may not deny that these words offer the meaning to the sentence; most of the stop words do not contribute any essential information to the user, for one of the reason being search engines to avoid the Stop words. Stop words are being over used in the content that they tend to decrease the weightage to the keywords.

    What actually are Stop words in SEO?

    • I take a tour of the Best theatres in Milan
    • Milan’s Best theatres

    From the above titles, things are clearly evident that sometimes stop words are overused to increase the word count and deviate from the important subject. Stops words take the space off the informative content and in particular even from the keywords. It is also to be noted that, almost 25% of the content forming the post in taken up by the stop words. To put an end to this misery, search engines like Google decided to stop considering commonly used words and decided to draw a list in the name of Stop words. These stop words are ignored when the search engines index your content.

    It’s not completely bad to pitch in the words in your content categorized under Stop words. Of course, not using them will not make a meaning to the sentence, well at least not how you meant it to be. But, it is advisable to avoid using them to a good amount of extent. Google does understand and accepts using Stop words under necessary circumstances.

    While constructing Meta titles, strong keywords, tags, links, it is best case to avoid the Stop words. Google indexes your content based upon the search term raised by the user. When Google encounters content when content holds up stop words to contribute meaning to the sentence then it includes them to the exception list. In fact, Google has a list of phrases where using stop words in the content would not affect your search results. One of the underlying purposes to introduce the stop words is to benefit the business providers who offer information enriched contents to the customers, to those who make use of the keyword strategies in pushing up their website on the search results.

    Using stop words does not affect the SEO rankings unless being overused. Avoiding usage of stop words in the primary keywords, URLs, titles will have positive effects in promoting the website higher in the search results. Clearly search engines are not against the usage of stop words, but they are against when content is replaced for it. Remember to follow the above tips to rank your website up under the search rankings.

    Written by Aayush
    Writer, editor, and marketing professional with 10 years of experience, Aayush Singh is a digital nomad. With a focus on engaging digital content and SEO campaigns for SMB, and enterprise clients, he is the content creator & manager at SERP WIZARD.