Keyword Optimization, Prominence and Stop Words

There is a filter in all the important search engines (e.g. Google, Yahoo, MSN) which can penalize your web site and have it de-indexed from the listings. We can call this the \'spam filter\' for lack of a better description. The purpose of filter is to prevent webmasters from using underhand techniques such as placing many keywords with white text on a white background, placing many keywords into their image tags, and so on.

One of the most often-used ways of over-optimizing web pages and get penalized is to make all your incoming links exactly identical to each other and your page title and keywords all the same as the links. Some search engines will drop you from the top 1000 for tactics like this. However, it is possible to recover by correcting the issues. Just vary your incoming links to different keywords and key phrases, change around your title tag and vary your image ALT tags.

Now let\'s talk a little about what are known as \'stop words\'. You should keep in mind that many search engines deliberately ignore certain words. These words are called \"stop words\". Common stop words are \'the\', \'a\', \'an\', \'this\', and \'that\'. Although stop words may be useful in natural language processing; most keyword-based approaches don\'t use grammar to process user input, consequently this content is not used effectively.

Stop words do not count in search rankings but they may have an effect on the actual search engine results. The reason why there may be differences is because of the proximity of the keywords to each other. Most search engine results will filter out the stop words and they will not have any effect. Google almost always returns this phrase: The \"AND\" operator is unnecessary - we include all search terms by default with a link to explain the details.

Keyword prominence refers to how prominent the keywords are within a web page. The general rule is to position important keywords at or near the top of a web page, sentence, TITLE or META tag. Keyword proximity, on the other hand, refers to the nearness between two or more keywords. In general, the closer the keywords are to each other, the better.