Understanding Stop Words and How to Avoid Them

Imagine the next time you join a discussion about SEO. When you start sharing the fascinating SEO facts below, your friends will be absolutely amazed.

To understand how to avoid stop words, you first have to understand what stop words are. 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. This means that your website will not be indexed. If your website is already indexed in a searched engine, the crawler will come back to see if there are 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.

Different search engines have different lists, but some are nearly universal �" usually words that refer to sites with graphic sexual content, or other ‘adult' material. We can't really put a list here, or you'd never find this page! You should be able to tell what they are for the most part, but remember, pornographic web sites will often get indexed as well. The norm for search engines is that they will attempt to avoid content that is illegal. When they encounter adult oriented sites, they will generally only ban sites that contain especially vulgar or illegal materials. The problem being that many of these sorts of sites will use “gateway” pages that have no content other than “click here to enter.” These sites are less likely to be caught with the stop word censors.

These aren't the only stop words, however. Some search engines create different lists of stop words for each different kind of website. What does this mean? Well, the algorithms which rank the pages determine how many times on a page a keyword is listed. Keep in mind that there are people trying to keyword stuff their pages to improve their ranking. If a word is not relevant to your site, don't list it in your key words. This is one easy way to avoid losing your index privileges. There is no reason to try to lure people into your site on key words that don't apply as they will not stick around long enough to provide you with revenue anyway.

Now you might be asking what keyword stuffing is. Keyword stuffing is when someone uses the same keywords over and over again in the meta tags and the content of the web page. If you're searching the web and you come across a website that seems to be ranked far too highly, then keyword stuffing is usually to blame. The search engines work hard to stop people from using these kinds of tactics, and usually de-list sites that they find to be using them. That's why some sites can be listed near the top for a while, before one day seemingly disappearing altogether. 

Hopefully the information presented so far has been applicable. You might also want to consider the following:

Some sites, however, get ejected for repeated keywords, even though these sites aren't trying to keyword stuff. This is where keyword analysis comes into play. To avoid repeating the same word or phrase too many times, you need to analyze your pages before you submit them �" you wouldn't want your efforts at finding good keywords to go to waste.

Although search engine optimization is a long-term effort, the processes and rules change frequently, without any warning. There are, however, tools available that will help you to stay on top of what's going on in SEO. Many tools can be tried out at no cost, letting you try before you buy. There are so many to choose from that you can't just start downloading them �" you will want to read the information on each tool before you make a decision.

By using these tools before you submit your pages to any search engines, you will fully understand "stop words" and how to avoid them! You need to keep in mind, though, that different search engines have different stop word lists, so words that don't matter to one search engine can stop your site from being listed on another.

There are also some words that aren't included in searches, such as ‘and', ‘of', ‘the', and other small words. You should keep these words out of your meta tags, as they're just a waste of space.

The day will come when you can use something you read about here to have a beneficial impact. Then you'll be glad you took the time to learn more about SEO.

James Mahony is the founder of Search Engine Optimization Tips - A site dedicated to Search Engine Optimization

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