How to Do On-Page SEO for Your Site Using Bold Technique
On-page SEO, also called on-site SEO, is a set of processes that we perform on our website to optimize it for search engines. These processes (or techniques), are numerous and each of them contributes to a better search ranking for specific keywords, for example, On-page SEO checkup. Well-known on-page techniques are: creating compelling content, proper usage of keywords and text length, header tags, links, meta tags, URL, images, protocols.
However, there’s one technique that’s little known and that triggers different opinions regarding its effects on the on-page SEO – bold technique or highlighting tags.
Many pieces of research regarding on-page SEO analyzer that are done and published online claim that putting keywords in bold (by using <B> and <strong> HTML tags) but also italic (<I> and <EM> tags) has a positive impact on the rankings of websites. However, some opinions state it has no influence at all. Let’s unveil who’s right and who’s wrong. Will make such a simple move really improve your Google ranking?
What Are Bold and Italic Tags?
There are four most common HTML elements that are usually styled in bold or italic text within HTML documents: <b>, <strong>, <i>, and <em>. You can easily apply them, just by putting the text you want to style between the two tags:
- <b>your text here</b>
- <strong>your text here</strong>
- <i>your text here</i>
- <em>your text here</em>
In the first two examples, the browser will display the text in bold. In the last two cases, the browser will display the text in italic. Those who aren’t equipped with the programming knowledge might use, for instance, <b> instead of <strong> or <strong> instead of <b>. That’s why we’ll explain the difference between these tags.
Essential Differences Between HTML Tags
Although they have the same effect, the HTML elements <b> and <strong>as well as <i> and <em> aren’t identical.
Essentially, <b> and <i> are used to define bold and italic text. Their importance doesn’t go any further than this. They simply instruct the browser what the text that’s changed should look like. The remaining two tags are used to emphasize the content they carry. In other words, <strong> and <em> define a semantic emphasis.
The first one defines bold text with adjoined semantic “strong” importance. The other one defines emphasized text with adjoined semantic importance. In plain language, these two HTML elements highlight that a specific text is important.
How Google Treats HTML Tags?
Practically, all recent researches showed that Google doesn’t treat the <b>and <strong> tags, as well as<em> and <i>, in a special way when it comes to ranking and the way web pages are indexed.
For some period of time, Google was giving weight to the key phrases in italic and bold, thinking that these were valuable highlights, but that practice ended a few years ago as these techniques were used for manipulation – to spam search engines – and gained an unfair advantage in the ranking.
So, now, the text that’s put in bold or italic is ranked exactly the same as all the other words. OK, metrics might show that terms bold and italic can have a secondary effect of increasing engagement, which results in a slightly longer time spent on a page and on a website in total, perhaps, even in measuring visited pages.
This all, of course, can only minimally improve conversion rates as the ultimate result. It doesn’t happen often but, in case Google runs some lower matching criteria, links, title tags, header tags, image alt text, and description meta tags put in bold and italic can weigh more than those who aren’t highlighted that way.
Is Bold Technique Important for On-Page SEO?
The answer is: Not officially. A lot of speculations circulate on this topic, some advise you to use bold, others advise not to waste your time with it. The truth is that we can only guess if bold and italic keywords affect the on-page SEO ranking or not.
Given that the usage of bold and strong HTML tags as a part of the SEO process is still up for debate in regard to its relevance and preference, you’ll find websites expressing the opinion of some experts who believe that Google robots offer value for <bold> text over <strong> text. Google’s crawlers are able to understand the bold tag and it displays the used text as bold.
These experts say that using the specific keywords in bold style helps the search engines in tracing out the website. According to them, keywords wrapped in <bold> play a vital role in the focus search engines, apart from important meta tags.
Furthermore, these opinions even claim that using bold HTML tags to highlight targeted keywords is one of the major on-page SEO services to top search engine results. But, of course, the bold tag needs to be used carefully and wisely if you want targeted keywords to have more significance in search results.
What’s certain, and all IT experts agree on that, is don’t use strong tags inside a sentence that’s already put in bold. It looks spammy and it’s obvious that you did it for the purpose of search engines and not for users.
Google penalizes websites that are trying to pull off technical tricks. It favors only websites that do things that benefit users. So, this way you’ll do more harm to your website than helping your SEO.
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Should You Be Using Bold Tags on Your Website?
Our modest opinion is that even if using bold and italic tags within pages has any impact on rankings (remember, it isn’t confirmed!), it’s so negligible that it’s much better to spend your time on other things that will actually help the on-page SEO of your site.
Yes, you should keep put words in bold or italic but only for the sake of users who consume your content. When people read some content they “scan” it and bold and italic tags are making it easier to read. This way, you’re not only helping users to understand your content faster, which improves their user experience and their engagement with your content but also reduces a page bounce rate.
Also, instead of focusing on which phrases to put in bold, try focusing on making important parts of your guest blog posts larger and moving it to the top of your page. It makes your content more prominent and is much more likely to affect rankings compared to bold text.
We already mentioned Googlebot as something that might go into the favor of those opinions who say bolding keywords is good for SEO. This web crawler software used by Google to render web pages has been experiencing technical advances in the last few years so now, using tags that affect the appearance of text won’t help you.
Googlebot will realize that your entire phrase is bolded, will apply all your CSS to the page, and realize that your <strong> keyword is no different than the text surrounding it. So, trying to pull off a trick won’t likely be effective for Google.
Best Practices for Using Bold Tags
The official HTML standards offer the best possible practice for the usage of bold and italic in keywords, but also in general as well, so we’ll refer to these standards.
This is what the official HTML 5 specification implies:
- Headings should be denoted with the <h1> to <h6> tags,
- The emphasized text should be denoted with the <em> tag,
- Important text should be denoted with the <strong> tag, and
- marked/highlighted text should use the <mark> tag.
The HTML 5 specification also implies:
- The <b> and <i> tag should be used as a last resort if turns out that no other tag is more appropriate.
- The <i> tag can be used to indicate a technical term, a phrase from another language, a thought, a proper noun, etc.
- The <b> tag can be used to bold text on the web page, but it’s recommended to use the CSS font-weight property to set bold text.
Conclusion
Even though it’s shown that users, in most cases, pay more attention to semantics in bold, don’t overdo bolding in texts because it makes page design look poor and content unreadable.
What might help readers is bolding a call to action or just important notice(s) about the topic of the article? If all this is done to help people scan while reading, it can be useful, but design-wise – think of using bullets or an entire filet at the top of the page which pins the essential details and will be scanned by readers first.
As we already said, Google has found a way to ignore spammy links and tags, so be sure it will ignore bold text spamming for ranking purposes.
