What exactly are stop words?

Stop words are very common words or adjectives that can hinder your SEO efforts. Words such as, ‘of ‘ , ‘or’,  ’the’ etc.  interfere with your SEO efforts because they use up precious character space, especially when creating web page titles. Page titles should should be short and concise because search engines will not read any more than 65 – 70 characters including spaces. Search engines analyze the ratio of keywords to total words in a page title to determine keyword density. Stronger keyword density will increase search rankings. 

Here is an example of how a page title can be adjusted to eliminate stop words and increase keyword density.

Original title:
Official Home Page of the Office of  (office name here) at the Illinois Institute of Technology

Change to
(office name here)  | Illinios Institute Technology

<– List of Stop Words  -  avoid these words in page titles