Have you ever wondered why, despite including nearly everything, your page title is not able to improve the rankings of your webpage ?
The answer is pretty simple. In order to get high SEO rankings, you don’t just have to include necessary keywords in your page title. You must also try not to include certain words, also called as Stop Words.
What are Stop Words?
Stop words are those extremely common words that search engines don’t take into consideration, in order to speed up their search results or to save their disk space or whatever the reason is. But these filtered words are known as “Stop Words”.
Most common Stop Words
| an | click | go | links | most | other | two | what |
| and | com | has | me | msie | page | us | when |
| any | copy | have | ie | net | reserved | use | where |
| are | copyright | he | if | netscape | ring | view | which |
| as | copyrights | help | in | new | since | visitors | who |
| at | do | home | inc | no | site | was | why |
| be | edu | homepage | is | not | text | we | will |
| been | find | how | it | of | than | we’ve | with |
| best viewed with | htm | you | http | on | that | web | www |
These are the most common type of stop words that, mostly, every search engine overlooks. However, various websites have their own long lists of Stop words. But I am not sure if they are right or not.
How can Stop Words affect your SEO rankings?
When you search for something, with these stop words, search engines don’t consider these words and concentrate only on other relevant keywords to provide you more effective results.
For example, if someone search for “Movies playing in the United States”. In this case, search engines would (mostly) ignore “in”and “the”, and provide results that include keywords like “Movies”, “playing”, “United”, and “States”.
However, it doesn’t mean you should not use them at all. But, these words can reduce your SEO rankings, if overused in your page title. This is because of the fact that they waste a lot of space in your website’s title tag, which you can utilize for other important keywords.
So, it is advisable to exclude these stop words, wherever possible, from your page title. It would result in improving your SEO rankings and, thus, bring free traffic on your websites.
Note: Make sure to omit the Stop words, from your title tag, only if it doesn’t affect the meaning of your Page Title. Your page title should be meaningful so that your users can understand. And for this purpose, you sometimes have to include certain stop words in your title. Though, you must not over use it.
So, by not overusing (or reducing the use of ) Stop words, you can improve the SEO rankings of your website to bring massive free traffic on it.
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I like this balanced and very fair observation on stop words in page titles. Some articles are claiming that any stop word will significantly reduce your ranking which is not correct. Actually if you search for “Statue of Liberty” 9 out of 10 results have the stop word (‘of’) in the title. And in this case this could also have a positive impact on the CTR because the whole phrase is marked as bold.