When doing keyword research and SEO copywriting, have you ever wondered if those little insignificant words – “in,” “the,” “to,” etc. really counted?

Here’s a pretty comprehensive list of unsearchable terms from Wikimedia, (subsidiary of Wikipedia), referred to as “stop words.” These are the words such as “the” that aren’t really considered part of the keyphrase – the search engines’ spiderbots simply look over these words.

So the phrase “fishing in the river” translates to “fishing river” for the search engines.

Or, something like that.

Google claims these terms are ignored because they slow down your search.

Another site, Ranks.NL, claims to have a list of Google’s stop words.

While neither source’s claims are written in granite, it is important to note the concept so that when doing keyword research, you don’t get stuck on trying to indclude the “throw away” terms.

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