What's the deal with stop words?

by mikehende 6 replies
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Hey guys, I setup Yoast SEO plugin on a site and filling in the page title and focus keyword fields I am seeing this:

Stop words (a, the, of, for) are usually filtered out by Google in a search query. The Yoast SEO plugin would advise you to filter the stop words from your focus keyword as well (and optimize your post or page with a focus keyword without stop words)

Should I pay attention to that since I was told here on this forum that google will piece together words to recognize a keyword?
#search engine optimization #deal #stop #words
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  • Profile picture of the author MikeFriedman
    Originally Posted by mikehende View Post

    Hey guys, I setup Yoast SEO plugin on a site and filling in the page title and focus keyword fields I am seeing this:

    Stop words (a, the, of, for) are usually filtered out by Google in a search query. The Yoast SEO plugin would advise you to filter the stop words from your focus keyword as well (and optimize your post or page with a focus keyword without stop words)

    Should I pay attention to that since I was told here on this forum that google will piece together words to recognize a keyword?

    I wouldn't pay attention to much of anything Yoast tells you to do.

    Your "focus keyword" means absolutely nothing.
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    • Profile picture of the author mikehende
      Ok so what do you guys use these days for keyword optimzation, no plugins only on-page SEO, backlinking e.t.c?
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      • Profile picture of the author MikeFriedman
        Originally Posted by mikehende View Post

        Ok so what do you guys use these days for keyword optimzation, no plugins only on-page SEO, backlinking e.t.c?
        Yep.

        The only reason to use a plugin like Yoast is it makes a few tasks easy like creating sitemaps, setting up canonical tags, no indexing author or category pages (if you want to), etc.

        Its tips and guidelines are pretty much crap.
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  • Profile picture of the author michaelkoehler92
    Yeah right I never value yoast tips about the keywords or my article value.
    Yoast is only installed for sitemap.
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  • Profile picture of the author dave_hermansen
    Really, it makes no sense at all. The tool contradicts itself. If stop words are "usually filtered out by Google" that means they are also ignored in your "focus keyword". Why, then, would you need to remove them from your focus keyword if search engines are already doing it?

    If they are saying that you only need to remove them from the tool so that it can better determine your keyword density (as if that matters at all), how come the tool is smart enough to know they are there but not smart enough to filter them out, itself?
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