There are certain words that the search engines ignore when they are indexing your website. The engines also ignore single digit numbers as well as single letters. These are known within the SEO industry as stop words. The search engines filter these words out because they tend to slow down searches significantly and they do not help to improve the search results.
Every search engine makes use of its own stop word list, but some of the more common words that are used all across all engines and are useful in search engine optimization are:
a, about, an, and are, as at, be, by, from, how, I, in, is, it, of, on, or, that, the, this, to, was, we, what, when, where, which, with
Using these words can help you long tailed keyword phrases make sense to human readers, while at the same time getting your site indexed for the chosen keyword.
The criteria that are considered to be important to the search engines include keyword usage in the title of the document, the text that is used within the body of the document, and of course the text that is used in the outbound links. You need to be especially careful when you are choosing keywords. If your title ends up including several of these stop words, then chances are you won't get any search results for use of the title. Additionally it may actually dilute the value of your keywords in the title.
It is for this reason that the search engines recommend that when you are optimizing your pages you limit the number of letters that are used in titles and meta tags. If too many stop words are used in these areas, you may end up exceeding the number of allowed characters before your keywords even show up.
Other words can actually prevent your pages from being indexed at all believe it or not. These words are typically considered adult word words and phrases that are sexual in nature. A given engine may or may not have measures in place as well to prevent a site from being stuffed with keywords, and the spiders will ban sites found like this. The unfortunate side of the coin is that sometimes websites are banned and the webmaster actually meant no harm and simply used keywords too many times on the page. As a general rule of thumb, you should be targeting about a 2% keyword density on a given page, and certainly no more than 3% or you may be targeted as a keyword stuffer whether you did it intentionally or not.
To summarize then, you should do the follow and you'll be safe in your optimization efforts:
- Use the most important keywords in the beginning of the sites title, in the meta tags and in text links where possible.
- Use the stop words where necessary, but as sparingly as possible in order to preserve the effectiveness of your chosen keywords and phrases
- Pay careful attention to keyword density within each web page.
About this Author
If you would like to learn more about search engine optimization and affiliate marketing [http://www.affiliatemarketing.bz], pay our site a visit.
John Derossett is a writer and online marketer and has been marketing online in various industry's for more than 10 years. He and his wife own and Operate AllStar Marketing Association, Unique Website Content and several other similar websites.
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