Stop Words

I'm in trouble...

[jo1ene]

I never did pay much attention to stop words lists because I thought it was pretty much self explanitory. A, the, in, out, because, welcome... I've never really used a keyword tool until recently, so I decided to try the one on this site just for giggles.

Boy, did I bomb out! So I look in the stop word list. To my horror, two out of the three words in my big (and very competitive) phrase are stop words!? I'm very confused! How are my competitors doing it?

I guess I can understand why they're there, in the stop word list. A lot of people have them on their site for no good reason. But that's what I sell!

Maybe that's why I'm having SERP ranking problems...

[troels nybo nielsen]

Could some of your confusion be because you have not quite understood what a "competitive" keyword or key phrase is? There are some combinations of words that can be found on millions of pages but still are not really competitive because no-one is actually targetting them.

What kinds of pages are on top for your phrase? Your "real" competitors or just generally strong pages that happen to have your non stop word in a prominent place?

[jo1ene]

What kinds of pages are on top for your phrase? Your "real" competitors or just generally strong pages that happen to have your non stop word in a prominent place?

Yes in fact they are real competitors. Some of the pages that come up are more informational than commercial. But for the most part they're direct competitors.

For instance, welcome is a stop word. Many sites say welcome on them somewhere. "Welcome to my web site!" I get why it would be excluded.

But what if I'm trying to sell hand made welcome mats. I guess you could call them something else but EVERYONE calls them welcome mats. Everyone is searching for welcome mats. But you can't analyze your page for the two word phrase "welcome mats" because welcome is a stop word. Huh?

BTW This "welcome mat" industry is a huge one. If welcome is a stop word, what keywords are SE's ranking?

[troels nybo nielsen]

Some weeks ago a member wrote a post about a phrase that was supposedly "competitive". Can't remember how many million pages there were. His phrase actually was made of three individually very common words, but when I searched his phrase with quotation marks it appeared that there were only about 30,000 pages.

I get the impression that your phrase is more common than that, but does the top results change significantly when you search with quotation marks?

[jo1ene]

3,650,000 results for three-word phrase in quotes.

1,140,000 results for a related three-word phrase in quotes.

6,830,000 result for two-word phrase in quotes, albeit a more vague phrase and many of them more informational that commercial.

Imagine your ONLY product is fuzzy blue widgets. Fuzzy and blue are stop words. Widgets is WAY too vague.

Obviously, a whole lot of people are buying fuzzy blue widgets, as are a lot of companies are selling them.

I'm just wondering how SE's handle that. And is SE's are returning relevant results for a three word phrase when two of them are stop words, why don't keyword alalyzers...well..analyze them.

I've stopped making sense a while back, although I'm not sure where. I appologize.

[troels nybo nielsen]

I think you make perfect sense, but you may be handling your problem at the wrong end.

If your market is large even some secondary keywords should be fairly good to have. If the competition for the best keywords is overwhelming you might target some of those secondary keywords or phrases.

[jo1ene]

If the competition for the best keywords is overwhelming you might target some of those secondary keywords or phrases.

And what if they're just as competitive? JK!

Seriously though. It's just one of those products that are called by a two or three word name. There isn't really a way around it aside from regional targeting.

I'll try to "theme it up" a little and see what I get in my next revision.

[tedster]

I also would not get too upset about a stop word list that was included in one particular analysis tool. The trend on Search Engines has been toward fewer and fewer stop words in recent years.

For instance, let's use your example of the word "welcome". It is not a stop word for Google. And I can't seem to trigger ANY stop words at all on Yahoo. For example, very interesting results on a search for the three word phrase of a mind. Google discards two stop words, but Yahoo serves up results.

And while I'm talking about "the", if you do a Google search on just that single word today, you get results. It's only a stop word if it's in a phrase.

There's a lot of semantic analysis at work on contemporary search engines -- they've moved a bit beyond simple text match and will continue to move further. So if you have a common phrase that describes an exact product, I'd be surpised if it slipped through their net.

[jo1ene]

Thank you so much, tedster. This is exactly what I was wanting to hear. Although all the analysis tools I've ever used don't see my page right, obviously search engines serve up results of some kind. I just wanted to know the logic of this and why I should care.

[ogletree]

By the way you don't need those keyword tools. It is really not that important in the grand scheme of things. KW density is way overdone these days. It does not help that much. Just get the kw in there as much as you can and make it still read ok. A kw more than 10 time on one page is more than enough.