Should stop words be used in titles? I'm aiming for natural title structure.

[zorsto]

I have fully optimized on-page SEO for the following keyword (not really the one I use, but it can serve as an example):

-personal driver in los angeles

Even though "in" is a stop word, I prefer to have a natural (non-robotic) structure for the title - I do this by including "in". I believe that "personal driver los angeles" is too spammy and too robotic.

Is this a good or a bad thing?

[vmialik]

In this example follow your natural human instinct, not your robot/SEO instinct.

Human instinct: personal driver in los angeles

Robot/SEO/keyword mindset, personal driver los angeles.

However another way of doing this is "los angeles personal driver" doesn't need stop-word and sounds natural.  Also sometimes los angeles personal driver might be searched more often than personal driver los angeles see an image I attached as an example

But again in all of this try to write content for the person and not the search engines, so keep that human instinct on when you do this. Hope this helps

QOTTyUb

[zorsto]

But wouldn't "los angeles personal driver" also trigger broad search term "personal driver in los angeles" and show up on the top - in case the page has a very good SEO.

What if I use "personal driver in los angeles" in body text to keep the natural flow and use "personal driver los angeles" for the title?

[TheeDigital]

Great question that all of us have probably asked at some point, but as Vadim pointed out whenever there's a question in regards to content always ask yourself are you doing this for the spiders or human.  If you go with the spiders you might have a short term win, but in the long term you should always think about the human when creating content.  These rules/thoughts should always be asked if you have any SEO hesitations.

[vmialik]

I just gave a suggestion you have to do your keyword research to see what keyword makes sense to go with, aka the one that gives most focused traffic that you are after.

As for body text vs title, the general consensus is to keep the keyword same in the title as in the body text, alt tags, meta description etc.

Hope this helps!