How does SEOmoz account for articles (a, the) and transitions (in, on) in keywords?

[simply180]

For instance, if I want to track traffic for a sports memorabilia store in Miami, and I only have "sports memorabilia shop Miami" as a keyword to track, will it track traffic of people who visited the shop's site after searching for "sports memorabilia shop IN miami"? Or would I have to use both "sports memorabilia shop Miami" AND "sports memorabilia in Miami"? I know Google doesn't show results with "in", "and", "the", etc., but Google Analytics tracks them, so I'm curious about how SEOmoz does it. Thanks in advance.

[Peterli]

Hi Jason,

Thanks for reaching out! In terms of how our system handles articles and transitions in keywords.  We give our users full control on how they want to format their keywords.  In your particular case since we pull the SERPs in Google it won't affect your rankings data, however since we pull our traffic data from Google Analytics, it might be best to put in a format would make cause the least amount of friction I.e with articles and transitions. Please note for the above I am only referencing Google US, in some locale articles does matter for some search terms.

Hope that was helpful!  Let me know if you have any questions by emailing help@seomoz.org.

Best,

[simply180]

Yes, that does help. Thank you for your response.