Stop words are very common words that search engines clear out before or after the processing of natural language, data or text. These words have very little value and are therefore ignored by search engines. Some of the most commonly used stop words are: the, is, at, which, and on.
Stop words can negatively affect your SEO efforts, especially when used in article titles. You should avoid using these words in titles and a few other areas for SEO purposes, some of which include:
- Page title tags
- Webpage URLs
- Meta descriptions (as much you can without reducing readability)
- Image Alt text (where possible)
By limiting the use of stop words in these places, your content has a chance of ranking better in search engine results.
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