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Hi, This may be a stupid question but... Google ignores short/common words like 'in', so if I optimize a page for 'painter in new york' will it rank just as well for 'painter new york'? In Google's keyword tool, exact match gives [painter new york] 140 searches per month but [painter in new york] gets < 10. However, it is much more difficult to write 'painter new york' naturally into body copy than it is 'painter in new york'. So what do I do? Thanks 🙂

Hi, I have employed a copywriter to write copy for client's new site and I need to make sure that I'm going to get SEO friendly copy. The client is a high end builder. I have a couple of questions... 1. At the moment, she is intending to keep the copy really brief for humans as the intention is just to get people to call up and book an introductory appointment and she believes that potential clients won't want to read a lot of text - just enough to get them to call. She is currently suggesting only 100 words per page (including the home page) but this seems really low to me - is this going to harm search rankings? What's the minimum number of words per page that I should ask for? 2. Doing keyword research using the Google keyword tool shows that the most popular keywords are for things like 'builders manchester' (i.e. service in plural followed by location). However, these phrases are quite difficult to write for. She wants to leave these phrases to be photo captions and then use much easier phrases such as 'builders in manchester' in the rest of the copy. She says that Google ingnores small words like 'in' so 'builders in manchester' will actually count as 'builders manchester'. Is this true? For the location I am targeting, the equivalent of 'builders in manchester' gets many less searches than 'builders manchester' according to Google's keyword tool set to exact match. Are the recent Panda/Penguin updates likely to have changed the answers to the above questions (especially question 1)? Thanks in advance for your help 🙂