10 replies to this topic

[alpalino]

Hi

I would like to find out if it is helpful for SEO if i highlight the keywords in my blog. I use WEB CEO to optimize my pages. There is where I heard, if i use the keyword in bold it is better for SEs to pick it up. Is this true?

[Jill]

I would like to find out if it is helpful for SEO if i highlight the keywords in my blog.

I personsonally would not put any stock in that, no.

[copywriter]

There's nothing I've seen to confirm this however, it is thought that special formatting MAY offer just a bit of help. It's along the lines of using an ALT tag - it won't give you any major advantage, but it won't hurt either.

However, NEVER bold, italicize or add any special formatting just to please the engines. If it's a word that you would have bolded whether or not you were trying to get ranked, fine. If you are only doing it for the search engines, don't.

Edited by copywriter, 03 September 2006 - 07:28 PM.

[alpalino]

thanks copywriter and jill your answers were really helpful. That suggestion came from Web SEO software and I was wondering if it is true or not.

Also how good would it make if I use the keywords to link other pages of my site.

[Randy]

Welcome alpalino !

Also how good would it make if I use the keywords to link other pages of my site.

The anchor text can be quite important, especially if the anchor text from your internal and other peoples external links are sending the same message. And are reinforced by the text on the page.

Think of it like this...

When the search engine spiders go out to do their thing they have no idea what subject any certain page may be about. But by analyzing the anchor text of the pages they find linking to your page they can get a hint concerning what you or others think the page is about. They file this anchor text information away.

Then they get to the page and see that the content really is about the subject mentioned in the anchor text. So the engines are able to give a and say to others, Yes, this page is really about [insert subject/keywords].

Make sense?

FWIW, you're doing good to question what your software is trying to tell you. Sure such software can be helpful when trying to do a quick analysis of a site/page, but that's about it. Software has to make a lot of assumptions, many of which can be wrong. Optimizing is a lot more art than science, and the paint-by-numbers approach of SEO Software doesn't qualify as Art.

So it's wise to question blanket statements. Especially those produced by software. You would probably benefit from our [url=http://www.highrankings.com/forum/index.php/topic/833-tips-for-new-seos/]Tips for Newbies[/url] so that you know which questions to ask and start out with a good foundation.

[adi_azar]

Randy,
You mentioned about ALT Tag. My company web site does not use anchor text at all. We have a Google PR = 7 and have huge number of backlinks.
However, all these backlinks have an image instead of a text. DO you think that will harm the quality of backlinks?? Do you think we can do something to have higher quality for a backlink with an image ?

Adi

[Jill]

For your image links, if you can, you should definitely use some text in the alt attribute the same as you would if they were text links. That should do you just fine.

[Michael Martinez]

Hi

I would like to find out if it is helpful for SEO if i highlight the keywords in my blog. I use WEB CEO to optimize my pages. There is where I heard, if i use the keyword in bold it is better for SEs to pick it up. Is this true?

In their original Anatomy of a Large-scale Hypertextual Search Engine paper, Sergey Brin and Larry Page explained that their Google search engine design ranked sites on a combination of an "IR score" and PageRank, PageRank being their algorithm for determining the importance or value of Web sites based on linking relationships.

They noted in several places that PageRank was only one of many factors:

2.3 Other Features

Aside from PageRank and the use of anchor text, Google has several other features. First, it has location information for all hits and so it makes extensive use of proximity in search. Second, Google keeps track of some visual presentation details such as font size of words. Words in a larger or bolder font are weighted higher than other words. Third, full raw HTML of pages is available in a repository.

NOTE: Emphasis is mine, not Brin and Page's

They explain some of the other scoring factors in greater detail further on:

4.2.5 Hit Lists
A hit list corresponds to a list of occurrences of a particular word in a particular document including position, font, and capitalization information. Hit lists account for most of the space used in both the forward and the inverted indices. Because of this, it is important to represent them as efficiently as possible. We considered several alternatives for encoding position, font, and capitalization -- simple encoding (a triple of integers), a compact encoding (a hand optimized allocation of bits), and Huffman coding. In the end we chose a hand optimized compact encoding since it required far less space than the simple encoding and far less bit manipulation than Huffman coding. The details of the hits are shown in Figure 3.

Our compact encoding uses two bytes for every hit. There are two types of hits: fancy hits and plain hits. Fancy hits include hits occurring in a URL, title, anchor text, or meta tag. Plain hits include everything else. A plain hit consists of a capitalization bit, font size, and 12 bits of word position in a document (all positions higher than 4095 are labeled 4096). Font size is represented relative to the rest of the document using three bits (only 7 values are actually used because 111 is the flag that signals a fancy hit). A fancy hit consists of a capitalization bit, the font size set to 7 to indicate it is a fancy hit, 4 bits to encode the type of fancy hit, and 8 bits of position. For anchor hits, the 8 bits of position are split into 4 bits for position in anchor and 4 bits for a hash of the docID the anchor occurs in. This gives us some limited phrase searching as long as there are not that many anchors for a particular word. We expect to update the way that anchor hits are stored to allow for greater resolution in the position and docIDhash fields. We use font size relative to the rest of the document because when searching, you do not want to rank otherwise identical documents differently just because one of the documents is in a larger font.

So, based on what the Google founders originally said about their own ranking methodologies 8 years ago, yes, bolding text can help.

Now, take into consideration that Google has long claimed that Google's order of results is automatically determined by more than 100 factors, including our PageRank algorithm, and that earlier this year they revealed they use over 200 signals for ranking (look at slide 17), you have to ask: how much impact is any one factor going to have on their ranking algorithm?

Ideally, no one factor should have that much impact. Not even linking. In fact, I have long made a strong case for ranking on the basis of on-page factors over off-page factors. I do it all the time. Other people do it all the time, too.

Most queries produce results that are not derived from search optimized sites. Google claims (in the slide 17 referred to above) that 20-25% of all monthly queries have never before been performed on their search engine before. Every month, at least 1 out of 5 queries that Google sees have never been entered since they began recording the queries people use.

Bolding, italicizing, and otherwise emphasizing text may or may not help with any rankings. Using text in link anchors may or may not help with rankings.

You cannot be sure that your optimization efforts will outperform someone else's unoptimized content.

In practice, people have indeed been using individual factors (most often links) to outweigh other factors in the Google algorithm. But ideally if you don't think in terms of "what tricks can I use to look more relevant" and just focus on "what content can I present to my visitors that is valuable, informative, and relevant to what they are looking for", you'll do pretty good.

The single most common flaw I find in "highly optimized Web sites" that fail to rank is a lack of on-page content. If you give the search engines nothing to index other than the same or very similar link anchor text from a few hundred Web sites, you've given them about the equivalent of a page full of spam.


First and foremost, the search engines want to index useful, informative content (text). That content is relevant to the queries people use to search for it. Some types of content are more popular than others, therefore there are more queries for those types of content.

So your Britney Spears gossip page may indeed receive more traffic than your detailed tutorial on how to make and repair shoe linings. That's just the way it is. Bolding text, getting 10,000 links with the same anchor text, or using any other of the 100 or so most well documented search ranking factors won't guarantee everyone the kinds of results they want.

Providing useful, interesting, unique content is (in my opinion) the most effective way to generate good traffic from search engines.

[qwerty]

When Matt Cutts recently clarified that Google's algo treats <strong> in exactly the same way it treats <b> and <em> the same as <i> he said that an engineer had shown him the exact lines of code that demonstrated it that fact. It seems to me it's pretty safe to assume that it was something like an if statement checking to see if a given word appeared in bold or strong text, and to do something if that's the case.

If the algo is looking for words in those tags, why would that be? It could be checking to see if so many words are in those tags that there's no reason to treat them in any special way, but apart from that, I have to believe that, since bolded text stands out (whether it does so visibly on the page or not), its intention is to set certain words apart from others. As such, those words are being treated as more important than others, and if the SE is keeping track of that, it's drawing the same conclusion.

[copywriter]

Excellent info, guys!

[alpalino]

WOW. Good one. Thanks guys. Great information. . I don't do everything as my seo SW asks me to do. Although it helps to some extend, I prefer the suggestions from HUMANs, who been there and done it.