For those that may perhaps be unclear on the use of “stop words”, search engines (especially Google) do not take stop words into consideration when delivering results based on the users search query. There are exceptions to the rule, of course.

So how does this play a role in keyword research? Previously, Google’s External Keyword Tool delivered a fairly accurate set of results for your queries. Over the last couple of months, there have been minor updates to the engine, such as the Google Suggest feature that many of you will have seen when typing a query into Google (launched August 2008). Since then we have been noticing additional “incomplete” phrases that appear amongst the keyword results when performing keyword research using the Google External Tool. And when choosing the final keywords for SEO, people occasionally include these “incomplete” phrases in their final list owing to the high search volumes attached to them.