SEO
How to Rank Higher on Google: A Small Business Guide
How to rank higher on Google, step by step: choose the right searches, improve your pages, fix technical problems, earn trust and measure what works.
What Are Stop Words?
You know those short words that tend to fall between the more meaningful words in a sentence? Those are stop words. Think: a, an, the, by, for, of, or, and, but, how (among many others).
Given that this is an SEO blog, and we at Rock Solid Marketing operate as a Mildura SEO agency, it begs the question: how do stop words affect SEO?
Stop Words in SEO
Years ago, search engines often ignored stop words to save processing time, and SEO advice sometimes told website owners to cut them out of their copy. That led to awkward, robotic phrases written for search engines rather than people.
Today Google reads stop words in context. Since Google introduced BERT in 2019, its systems pay attention to small words like “for” and “to” because they can change what a search means. Google gave the example of “2019 brazil traveler to usa need a visa”, where the word “to” tells it the traveller is going to the USA, not from it (see Google’s announcement, Understanding searches better than ever before).
So there’s no need to strip stop words out of your website copy. Sentences that include them read naturally, and Google understands them.
One caveat: stop words can change the meaning of a search entirely. (e.g. “The Alamo” and “Alamo” are two very different searches)
SEO Best Practices
The bottom line is that you should write for people. There’s no need to pad your website copy with awkward phrases like “SEO services Mildura” in a sentence (rather than “SEO services in Mildura”) just to rise in the search rankings. A few practical tips:
Keep URLs short. Short, readable URLs are easier to share, so it’s fine to leave stop words out of page addresses (for example, /read-book-faster/ rather than /how-to-read-a-book-faster/).
Keep page titles natural. Titles have limited space, so trim filler words if you need to, but never at the cost of a title that makes sense.
Remember that the Yoast SEO plugin is just a guide. Its checks may flag stop words or exact-match keyphrases in ways that don’t reflect how Google reads your page, so use judgement.
