Does Google pick up on words such as "in", "the", "and" etc?
-
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.
-
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).
-
Thank you matthew. That helps alot.
-
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.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
How Do I Rank For This Type of Key Word?
Hello, We're a physical therapy practice and rank high for our physical therapy clinic and those type of keywords; however, how do I rank for keywords such as: back pain treatment? herniated disc treatment? We have pages specific to these keywords but aren't ranking. Thoughts?
On-Page Optimization | | scottgray06200 -
Thoughts on adding "near me" to title tag for local SEO?
I want to lean out my title tags and will most likely be doing an A/B test. They currently have the "Near Me" modifier in there, which I believe Google can distinguish local SEO without it. Thoughts?
On-Page Optimization | | imjonny1230 -
What makes a "perfectly optimized page" in 2013?
Hi all, I was re-reading this blog http://moz.com/blog/perfecting-keyword-targeting-on-page-optimization and wondered how relevant you guys thought this post still was? Moz link directly to it from their 'learn' page http://moz.com/learn/seo so I'm interpreting that to mean it is still accurate and as current as it can be? What else would you add to it? Thanks,
On-Page Optimization | | James-Distinction
James0 -
Solve "Too many links on page"
Hello, I own a Opencart site with a lot of products , I am getting this error in the campaign report, how can I fix it? Read other members replys but I dont understand how .. I would appreacite if you could explain it easy because my native language is spanish and my english is really poor I am really happy of find this site, incredible quality, thank you very much!
On-Page Optimization | | matiw0 -
Should "white label" sites be unique IP addresses?
My company is planning "white label" subsites with unique URLs. Should these sites be unique IPs in order to use them for link building?
On-Page Optimization | | theLotter0 -
Stumped on why Google is not showing main site pages anymore
Recently had sites homepage listing taken off first page for brand name search even though search term is not competitive. Does anyone have any ideas?
On-Page Optimization | | Luia0 -
"Canonical URL Tag Usage" recommendation in SEOmoz "On-Page Optimization" Tool
Here comes another one related to SEOmoz "On-Page Optimization" Tool. The tool says the following about one of our pages: Canonical URL Tag Usage Explanation: Although the canonical URL tag is generally thought of as a way to solve duplicate content problems, it can be extremely wise to
On-Page Optimization | | gerardoH
use it on every (unique) page of a site to help prevent any query strings, session IDs, scraped versions, licensing deals or future
developments to potentially create a secondary version and pull link juice or other metrics away from the original. We believe
the canonical URL tag is a best practice to help prevent future problems, even if nothing is specifically duplicate/problematic
today. Recommendation: Add a canonical URL tag referencing this URL to the header of the page. Let's say our page is http://www.example.com/brands/abc-brand and on its header we'll place the following tag: Is this correct? I thought the canonical tag was meant for duplicates of the original page, for example: http://www.example.com/brands/print/abc-brand href="http://www.example.com/brands/abc-brand**?SESSID=123** Thanks in advance.0 -
Can A Blog post impact negatively on Google rankings?
We used to rank fairly highly on Google for our preferred search term, but once we introduced a blog (or rather the blog excerps) onto our home page we dropped from page 1 to page 3 for our preferred search term. We have made the assumption this may be down to diluting of keywords and therefor the key phrase or message to the Search Engines was not as clear as it was before. Is this generally accepted as being the case ? If so - should each and every blog post excerpt start with the key seo search phrase to maintain the integrity of that search phrase ? or perhaps even better still is it best to have the blog on a dedicated page only with no excerpts on the home page ? We are using Wordpress and also using multiple categories within the blog - is it perhaps best to just have all blog postings on the one page and use TAGS more often? Thanksing you in advance.
On-Page Optimization | | kiswebsltd0