Hi all, This is my very first post ever in any SEO type forum, so please excuse me if I look like a dunce I was wondering if there is any way to get around a search engine excluding "stop" words if you REALLY need them for a keyword phrase. (and I do...just one but its a 617 KEI phrase). The word I want to use is "and". Now, Google for instance claims to not take stop words into consideration, yet stop words CAN AND DO effect the search results. Case and point, search for the word "and" alone on Google and you get over 3 billion results for that "excluded" word. Search the phrase (peanut butter AND jelly) then (peanut butter jelly) and you get different results. Do it with quotes around those phrases and you get different results still. The point here is I am way confused and need to find a way to include the word "AND" in my keyword phrase in a way search engines will recognize it.
Yes stop words do effect the serps. I can search for xxxxx xxxxxx or xxxxx in xxxxxx and get different results. I get even more varied resuts for xxxxxxxx xxxxxxx in xxxxxxx and xxxxx xxxxx xxxxxxx
Explain that to me in a little more detail please Shawn. Say for instance that I want to use the keyword phrase "peanut butter and jelly". If I use it in my title are you suggetsing I write the title like this 'peanut butter +and jelly'. Or that I write any occurence of the phrase in the on-page content like that? I think you are saying if he wants to have the stop word included in a search he is doing add the "+". But as I understand him that is not his question. The question is how can he optimize for a keyword phrase that includes a stop word. Now I have to admit that I have never understood or paid any attention to stop words. If I need the word to make sense of the phrase or for good english I simply use it. I also just ran two Search terms through Google, Yahoo and MSN: The terms are: The SEO Bitch SEO Bitch Yahoo and MSN gave identical results for both terms. Google put my web site by this name at #10 for The SEO Bitch and #1 for SEO Bitch. So I'm still not going to worry about stop words. I'll use them where I think they make sense and I won't if they don't. I'm not changing the english language for Google.
BTW I just added a "+" to the term The SEO Bitch and it made absolutely no difference to the Google SERP.
I don't know of any way around it. Google claims to ignore stop words but noone pays any attention to their claim. Not even google. You get different results when you search with and without the stopwords. All I can suggest is you check your referrer logs and optimize for how people find you. For me, that means optimizing for a phrase that includes stopwords.
I know you can use "+" before a stop word when you query a search, but to use a plus sign in a keyword or meta tag, well.....it just "smells funny". I think you're right about just using a stop word if it makes sense. I only recently started getting into this whole SEO thing, and it seems the harder I try the harder it gets to get it right. I had a chat site a few years ago which had a page rank of 4 before I even knew what SEO was! Guess I'll just get back to basic's, if my content is on topic, maybe google will like me...lol