Does Google pick up on words such as "in", "the", "and" etc?

[Louise99]

If I have in my meta-title e.g Holidays Ireland, but i have in my description for grammer purposes Holidays in Ireland will google see these as 2 separate keywords and will SEOMoz grade me lower for doing this? Or is holidays Ireland included in Holidays in Ireland because google doesnt pick up on "in" ??

I would appreciate your help on this.

[Dr-Pete]

There was a time when Google simply ignored so-called "stop words", for processing efficiency, and so they two queries in your example were essentially the same. It looks like that has changed over time, though. See this post from 2008 by Bill Slawski (an expert on Google patents and technology):

http://www.seobythesea.com/2008/01/new-google-approach-to-indexing-and-stopwords/

...and a quick experiment someone did in 2010 that seems to confirm that:

http://www.dougwilliams.com/blog/seo/stop-words-does-google-ignore-these-anymore.php

In my experience, it's a bit specific to the query and competition. In many cases, the addition or subtractions of a stop word may not make much of a difference, but in your case it probably does. If the term you want to target is "Holidays in Ireland" and the Top 10 for that term seems different from the shorter term, I'd say to use "in". I'm seeing some differences between those two sets of Top 10 results (not huge, but some).

[Louise99]

Thank you matthew. That helps alot.

[MatthewBarby]

Within your title tag, you shouldn't generally use connecting words like 'and', 'is', etc. Stick to just using 'Holidays Ireland' within this part of your webpage.

For the META description you should then use connecting words to make it coherent and understandable to users. The META description doesn't actually play an effect on your SEO rankings but remember that it will show keywords in bold if a user has searched for 'Holidays in Ireland', which will increase your click-through rate.

Hope this helps

Matt.