12 replies to this topic

[redsonia!]

Hi! I have two new online businesses, an educational toy site (allaboutlearning.org) and a gift site (brandysdelights.biz). I have been researching the optimization process and have several questions. I currently am using bold print for my text on these sites. A number of my clients and people who have looked over the site have specifically told me that they like the easy to read print. (A number of my clients are grandparents and some have vision problems). However, I have read that not all the text should be in bold print and that the search engines may actually ignore the text if it is all in bold print. Can anyone comment on this?

Also, I am using FrontPage 2002 and have heard that FrontPage has problems because it inserts extraneous HTML coding. Can this be a problem for me because my site is not using "clean" code? Will using FrontPage prevent me from getting high rankings? Should I switch to DreamWeaver?

I am still in the process of adding products to my site so I will not start the optimization process for about another month but I want to try to be aware of the various problems I may be facing and your input on these issues is greatly appreciated!

Thank you!

[Jill]

Welcome Redsonia!

However, I have read that not all the text should be in bold print and that the search engines may actually ignore the text if it is all in bold print. Can anyone comment on this?

That's completely false. Don't believe most of what you read!

Can this be a problem for me because my site is not using "clean" code? Will using FrontPage prevent me from getting high rankings? Should I switch to DreamWeaver?

Nope, nope, and not unless you want to.

[redsonia!]

Thanks very much! That definitely makes me feel better!

[Bill Slawski]

Hi redsonia!,

Bold is one of the options that you can use to try to make a site more readable.

There is possibly a benefit from an SEO stance to not make everything bold, but rather just the things that you want to emphasize. And, if someone is using a screen reader, and you are using <strong> to bold the words on your page, the screen reader may place more emphasis on the words on the page than maybe it should. With bold, I like to follow the simple rule that when you emphasize everything, you are really emphasizing nothing.

To improve readability on a site, there are a couple of other options that I might follow first, rather than using bold. One would be using a font size that might be a little larger than you would normally see. And not using a fixed size that can't be increased with the browser controls.

Another would be to try to use a font that is easy to read online. Body text on a monitor often tends to work best with a san-serif type font. A couple of good articles on font choice and readability here:

A Comparison of Popular Online Fonts: Which is Best and When?

So, What Size and Type of Font Should I Use on My Website?

I also try to avoid having large blocks of text, if I can. Use bulleted points, headlines, and other strategies to make the words on the pages easy to scan, too.

I don't think that the search engines would ignore your text with it all in bold. You just may not be geting any extra attention paid to certain words that you could bold, if you used it for just certain words and phrases on the page.

As for Dreamweaver and Frontpage, I don't know that there is much difference. Some of the things that you can do in both can create some extra html, that you might not get if you wrote the pages out in notepad, and tried to keep it extra clean. Most of the time it shouldn't be much of a problem at all with either, when it comes to search engines.

Having said that, it's my personal preference to try to keep the html on a site as simple as possible.

[redsonia!]

Thanks, Bragadoccio! I appreciate the comments and the links. I think I probably will change the bold text so that I can then emphasize some key words. The links were great; I've always personally preferred 12 pt Arial so it was nice to see that it does seem to be the preferred font on websites. Thanks for the info about FrontPage too. From other things I had read, I was worried that using it instead of DreamWeaver might have a negative impact on my rankings. I'm quite relieved to hear that it shouldn't make any difference.

Thanks again!

[Hyperformance]

Great questions redsonia -

Just to confirm, we have been using FrontPage for many, many years, and while some people talk of extraneous code, there is very little (of which you can remove if you need to). More importantly, I can assure you it has no bearing on your rankings capabilities.

Good Luck!

[redsonia!]

Thanks, Hyperformance!

[qwerty]

If you decided that you really want all of your text to be in a bold font, you don't need to put everything in <b> or <strong> tags. Just use your style sheet to set body text to be bold.

CODE

body { font-weight:bold; }

That way, you can achieve the look you want without sending the message to all user-agents that all of your text is more important than normal text (which wouldn't make a lot of sense).

[redsonia!]

I would like to keep my text in bold type if at all possible, without hindering my SEO efforts. If I set my body text to bold could I use italics to emphasize keywords in the text. I am currently using H1 tags at the top of the page, but also would like to emphasize the names of my products because they usually have an important keyword in them (e.g. I sell gift baskets and the name of the product may be Snack Attack Gift Basket). I usually have 5-6 products listed on a page. Would it be better to italicize the name, or would it be appropriate to use that many H2 tags on a page? If you want to see what I mean about emphasizing the product names, my sites are brandysdelights.biz and allaboutlearning.org. Any thoughts as to the best way to emphasize words if my text is kept in bold? Thanks!

[Jill]

Resonia, there's really no reason to emphasize words in your text for SEO purposes. Putting them in your header is a good idea, and then simply using them where they make sense to do so within the copy, will be fine.

[redsonia!]

Super! Thanks, Jill! Do you think it's OK for me to keep my text in bold for my clients, or would you recommend that I just use normal text?

[Jill]

It doesn't matter what I think. Do your visitors like bold text?

[redsonia!]

Yes, my visitors do like bold type. So it sounds like there is not really a strong reason to change it. Thanks, qwerty, for the style sheet suggestion.