Bold, Highlight, Underline, Italics?, do they really help to get your keyword? Options

[archmaille]

I was told that if you highlight, bold, etcetera... that it would help your SEO, but I figure I should run it by the experts here first. my question is pretty simple, does highlighting certain keywords make it easier for bots to find, and catagorize your desired keywords?

[qwerty]

It's not so much that it's easier for the bots to find. The theory behind the suggestion is that the bots don't just index words. They also keep track of what tags those words appear in. If that's true, and if the <b> tag is deemed to carry a bit more weight, then it would be true that words in bold tags would be given a boost.

But again, if that's true, it would mean that it wouldn't work to bold the text a different way, like setting up a named class in your CSS that happened to be set for font-weight: bold. It would have to involve the presence of the bold tag in the html.

And please note all the uses of the word "if" here. I have yet to see proof that this really works.

[Jill]

I tend to think it would not help and if used improperly, might even hurt.

By improperly I mean every instance of the keyword phrase being bolded on the page, or whatever.

[redbird]

Hi archmaille,

For search engines, I always suggest using bold text, italics, etc, in the same manner as you would when composing text for a human reader.

I don't believe such text emphasis makes a huge difference in the SERPs, and as Jill mentioned, it may very well lead to a penality if abused.

Compose for the human element, and the search engine element will better appreciate your efforts. :-)

IMO.

Jeff Bogumil

[archmaille]

Thanks everyone!! that helps a lot, and clears up the whole arguement for me. if it has the potential of hurting my search I don't think I need to try it.

[mal4mac]

But what if making the keyword bold works? Even if it has a small effect it could mean the difference between you getting on page 1 and lingering on page 2. The experts in this thread do not say it will not work, so why not try it? Take Jill's advice not to do something silly like make the keyword bold many times on the page. But I cannot see anything wrong with making the keyword bold once on a page. If, as it should be, your page is devoted to the keyword, you should have a definition of the keyword somewhere, or a place where the keyword is introduced. Then it is surely appropriate to make it bold. Not only might this help SEO but it will (i) help the user focus on the most important use of the keyword (ii) make your page less boring, usability experts recommend subtle highlighting to give the eye something to latch on to. In summary, making the keyword bold (or italic (IMG:http://www.highrankings.com/forum/style_emoticons/default/smile.gif) ) is an entirely valid thing to do.

[kology]

I've did some tests about a year ago. And the answer is yes it seemed to have some effect using the bold function. Yet when I used the strong tag (the proper way to indicate importance according to the W3C), it had no effect. How much, my paged moved on the targeted phrase 1 position. This could have been explained by various other factors.

Yet, when I code the same page and used H1 and H2 tags where I used bold/strong for headings I showed significant movement is Google and Yahoo.

Draw from that what you will.

[jbelle]

Yet, when I code the same page and used H1 and H2 tags where I used bold/strong for headings I showed significant movement is Google and Yahoo.

Like h1, h2 {font-weight: bold;} in your CSS or <h1><strong>This is my header</strong></h1>?

<ADDED>

And the answer is yes it seemed to have some effect using the bold function. Yet when I used the strong tag (the proper way to indicate importance according to the W3C), it had no effect.

So <b> had more effect than <strong>?

[qwerty]

Now I'm confused. Heading tags are bolded by default. If you want them to stay bold, you can leave font-weight out of the CSS for them.

And I'd never nest anything inside a heading tag, unless I was using an inline image with it (and even then I'd probably end up nesting the heading inside a span with the image).

I would hope that, assuming heading tags and bold tags carry more weight, bolding a heading tag would make no difference, since it's already bold.

[kology]

I used

CODE

<h1>main title</h1>

How the appear is handled by the CSS.

For testing purposes, it stated with something like this

CODE

<strong>main title</strong>

and saw no movement. Then I switched to

CODE

<b>main title</b>

and saw minor movement. It was only when I started using H1 and H2 tags (style controlled by CSS) that I saw major movement.

I have since switched the site to XHTML Strick (no tables) and organized the content in a logical way and use CSS for positioning. That change generated the biggest movement in the SERPs.

[chrishirst]

jbelle, I think what Alan (kology) was meaning is the h1 & h2 tags were replacing bolded headings.

I may be wrong though (IMG:http://www.highrankings.com/forum/style_emoticons/default/biggrin.gif)

[qwerty]

No, I think you're right, Chris. Which means I was wrong.

In any case, I'm glad to see that nobody's advocating bolding heading tags.

[jbelle]

Ahh... okay, I'm finally reading this all correctly. Thanks all.

[archmaille]

uhhhh.... ok now I'm confuzled... could someone translate this to english? css? h1 and h2? I'm so lost...

[qwerty]

There's a good CSS (cascading style sheet) tutorial at http://www.w3schools.com/css/default.asp