When planning an optimization campaign for your company’s website, perhaps you’ve hired an internet marketing agency for car dealerships, or some other businesses that you own. It’s a move that’s likely to pay off. Research has shown that companies that make use of SEO experts increase traffic to their sites, which leads to sales. It also makes sense for you, as a business owner, to know a little bit about SEO yourself. When you do, you can talk to the representatives from your marketing agency and hopefully understand what it is they’re trying to do.
To that end, we’re going to talk in this article about one of the standard terms you’ll run into when discussing SEO. Think of it as learning a useful vocabulary word. You may have heard the term “keyword” or “long-tail keyword” before. These are words or phrases that you should be putting in strategic locations on your website to make sure that search engines are taking notice. It’s important to use keywords, and also to avoid using stop words. Stop words are to be avoided at all costs, because they hurt SEO. They’re words that are filtered out when a search engine like Google crawls (reads through) the content on your website. They do so in order to save space in their databases, so the crawling goes faster.
Stop words hurt your SEO because they waste space. Space is at a premium when search results come up, and there are certain areas where the appearance of stop words can be detrimental. It’s funny to think that such small and seemingly insignificant words can make so much of a difference with something as important to your sales as page rankings, but that’s the case. What you especially want to watch out for are stop words in your meta descriptions, web page URLs, image alt text, and page title tags. Words like “all, as, be, do, each, further, go, if” are all stop words.
So, how can you be sure that you avoid using stop words? If you’ve hired a competent internet marketing agency, they should know what words to avoid. If you’re trying to do SEO yourself, it pays to go online and look for lists of stop words. There are Google analytics tools that will also help you weed out stop words. You want to make sure that your site is optimized, so you’re getting as many eyeballs on it as possible. Eliminating stop words is just another small but critical step toward making that happen.
