articles in keyword phrases

like 'a', 'the', 'an'

[shasan]

If the keyword phrase I want to optimize for is

"making a widget for beginners"

And I'm putting these keywords in the Title tag, the meta tags and in the body.

I don't have to have the phrase exactly like that do I? Google will ignore 'a' and maybe 'for' as well will it not? so I will get the same effect if I put in "making widget beginners"?

Please advise.

Cheers
shasan.

[heini]

What I would suggest is taking your phrase with and without the stopwords, putting it into the engines and see for yourself.
You will see serps are not the same :)

[shasan]

wow, you're right. the stopwords do make a difference. Wonder why that is... Google says that the following words were not included in your search: a, for.. .but it clearly includes them...

Wut the dealio?

Thanks heini.

[jeffb]

It's a matter of keyword proximety. The engines don't index stop words, but they take them into account when determining keyword proximity. In other words, if it's searching for "blue widget" it considers the exact phrase "blue widget" to be more relevant than "blue big widget." Thus, even if a stop word interrupts the keyword phrase (such as "blue the widget") it will recognize that there was an intervening word and consider the phrase less relevant to a search for "blue widget" than an exact match is.