Avoid stop words

  • Updated

Stop words are common words that search engines clear out before or after processing natural language, data, or text. These words have little value and search engines ignore them. 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.