Stop Words are the keywords which are unnecessary, useless and common for Search Engines like Google. Google ignores Stop words in content and meta’s like a title, description etc. It is very important for SEO professionals to understand why and where we need to avoid Stop Words. These keywords weaken or reduce the weight of targeted content when indexed by search engines.

Why Stop Words are Bad for SEO?

As we know Stop words reduce the weight assigned to the keywords. Search Engines reduce the common used keywords called as Stop words to speed up the search result, which also help to save some size of the database. Some examples are ‘is’, ‘and’, ‘are’ and there are hundred’s of more.

Let me explain with the example by using a Title

1. How To Write A Title Tag For SEO
2. Write Title Tag For SEO

Here you will notice that first line contains 4 and the second line contains only 1 Stop Words.

This means that important keywords in the first line are (Write, Title, Tag, SEO) and given half the weight of the whole line. The Second Line carries as much keyword as compared to first one.

But this doesn’t mean that you can’t use these words anywhere. You can use in the content body, without important words like “and”, “both”, “during”, your contextual information make no sense.


What are the places where we need to avoid Stop Words

Meta Tags like Title, Keywords
Anchor Text and Links
URL-slug
Use in the text body

Try to avoid Stop words as much as possible, but you may wish to use in these places.