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Possible Duplicate:
How to write content that uses keyword terms which are google stop words

I am using Wordpress SEO plugin by Yoast. When I have a title like,

"How to get slim in 30 days"

and the keyword to rank high is choosen to be 

`Get slim 30 days`

It does not accept "get slim in 30 days" to have the keyword inside it. Now I am a little confused because when I search in google, it highlights all of the matching keywords, irrespective if a stop keyword like in is placed between them. Is the plugin not perfect or does it really matter if I remove the in from the title?

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Out of curiosity, what exact field are you talking about? (Use the actual label in the UI; I see nothing called "keyword to rank high.") I just created a test post in a WP install with your title as above and then added "get slim in 30 days" to the Focus Keyword field and it was accepted just fine. – Su' Jul 20 '12 at 9:13
You could look for yourself and try to perform some searches with and without stop-words in your niche, and see if the result is changing. I notice a very small change, and often it's due to the position of local results when the stop-word is used for localisation (i.e. "coffee shop IN london" would push local results up, compared to "coffee shop london"), but nothing you can do about this! – milo5b Jul 20 '12 at 9:45

marked as duplicate by John Conde♦ Jul 20 '12 at 10:35

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2 Answers

up vote 1 down vote

You could include stop words but it is a waste of space if you are optimizing your SEO, think of how many pages across the internet include stop words.

Take a look at this post for a full list of stop words and this one for a little more explanation.

But a quick overview:

Benefits of Having Highly Optimized Title Tags:

  • Effective page titles are the number one factor in SEO.
  • Good page titles will help your site rank well for popular search terms.
  • Good page titles will help create more stability in your site’s rankings.

Consequences of Poorly Optimized Title Tags:

  • Poor page titles can result in your site not being indexed and ranked properly.
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up vote 1 down vote

Google stopped warning about stop words years ago and largely ignores them, but may still use them in some cases if they end up being relevant. You should read that Search Engine Land post and everything linked from it, but one of the simpler bits is:

The system would look for the less popular terms that appear in the query, and then look to see if the stop words in the query are nearby.

Realistically, unless you're using a particularly odd phrase construction, getting those extra words in probably won't make any difference. Things like "get slim [in] 30 days" are common enough they're going to be found anyway.

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