Thread: Increase Rankings with Bold Text

Interesting thread, bold done strategically in key areas can very well help increase attention from both humans and search engine spiders. However, some people go overboard with bold just SCREAMING FOR ATTENTION! I've seen some webpages where the whole darn page was in bold - and even some where it had all bold and caps like above. Again, bold can be good when done tastefully and strategically.

Thanks homebizseo!
Today i have learned something about on-site-seo!

SEO should always be in sync with reader satisfaction. Ive seen many sites where content is bolded and italized so much that lack of conversions total offset the extra SEO benefits. In my opinion..the best way to go at it is to bold your header and add up your main keywords to it, Divide your main articles into as many headers as you can and include your primary and secondary keywords in them and just bold up these headers.

bold text doesn't improve your on-site SEO.

PS. Avoid DP for SEO advice.

This would be something good to test...

It dosen't mean that it will directly increase ranking in SE. Yes it can be said that if you have eye catching title then it can surely insist visitors to visit your site again. In this way you can increase ranking.

About three years ago Matt Cutts did address this issue. He indicated that Google does place more importance on words within bold tags. He followed up with a video addressing the bold versus strong issue.

Here is a video that covers the equal treatment issue.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?do...37348670651505


Who knows what they are doing now.

Using <b> and <strong> do add a tiny boost... even at Google. However, I tend NOT to use it except on very rare occasions... and then, I use it sparingly.

I see rookie SEOs do this all of the time... They have a page on their blog that they are trying to rank for "forex trading" or "foreign exchange" or "foreign exchange trading" (i.e. their <title> element is something like "Forex - Forex Trading - Foreign Exchange Trading")... So what do they do? They bold every occurence of those keyword phrases (including occurrences of single keywords like "Trading", "Trade", "Foreign", etc. and slight variations of those) on their page.

It looks absolutely hidious from a user perspective IMO, and it is quite obvious to anyone w/ any SEO background (including Google Quality Raters or any Googler performing a manual review of the site due to a spam report) that they are trying to manipulate their rankings w/ the <b> or <strong> element.

If you're consciously adding <b> and <strong> to your markup to make it rank then it probably doesn't belong there. If, for example, you're highlighting a word that you are giving a definition for then that is ok.

I cheat on some of my sites and bold the keyword in the anchor text for the "bookmark this page" link:

Code:

Bookmark <a href="http://www.example.com/forex-trading.html" onclick="return external.AddFavorite(location.href, document.title)"><b>ForEx Trading</b></a>

It's looks natural and it's keyword stuffing goodness.

Originally Posted by homebizseo

A great magazine article will have a great title to grab your attention, and then it will use Bold Text to highlight keywords. Many aspects of Google SEO 101 are simply a common sense approach to writing and appealing to the human reader. When you open up a magazine article there are several parts of the layout that will grab you attention. The Title of Course and bold text is another. Use this same approach to grab the Google spider’s attention when doing your web page highlights for the keyword phrase that you are targeting as well as grab the reader’s attention. The use of bold text can also add value to your keyword hyperlinked text or anchor text. If you are using a forum signature with an embedded hyper link, add bold to give your signature more boost as well. Use bold for internal linkage as well to cross indexing your web pages. In conclusion, the use of bold text will set your article apart in searches and increase your chances of a first place ranking as well as give hypertext link keyword phrase and signatures a boost. I like to call it a “Boost of Bold.

I've heard of this many many times, but still a lot of people overlook the power of using BOLD tags. Those spiders pay just as much attention to the tags on pages as readers do to the resulting content outlay.