The Importance of Bold Text for SEO

Ever wondered whether bolding text on your copy had any direct impact on the overall ranking of your page. We are here to dispel any myths that may be associated with using HTML bold and italics tags to highlight certain parts of your content. This SEO technique has been used for decades to fool the bots on what keywords are relevant in the text. That was then, and this is now.

Google bots and algorithms treat bolding and italics just as the rest of the copy on your page. While there aren’t any reports suggesting that you will rank better if you use bold or italics on your keywords, the use of bold text flushes out the keyword faster than a sentence can describe.

How Google Treats BOLD Tags?

Google spiders and bots crawl your entire page with little to no regard for bold text because webmasters sought to trick them into ranking a page that uses bold and italics on keywords. Thus, whether or not you use bold and italics it is inconsequential to google. But, does that mean you shouldn’t use it at all.

How User Experience is Impacted By Bold Text

By default, users usually scan the content without reading for understanding upon landing on a new website. If they come across bolded text, they are able to ascertain what the entire page is all about. This is called ‘soft’ SEO strategy, in which the use of the strategy has no direct link to how search engines like Google & Bing rank a particular page. The general rule of thumb is that you shouldn’t bold everything, but only what is important.

The Importance of Bold Text for SEO

Differences in Bold Tags

There are two common HTML tags associated with the bold text within HTML documents:

<b> and <strong> elements that can be used to display the content in bold on a page, but they have different meanings to bots that crawl your webpage.

  • The <b> code is used to define the bold text on a page without assigning any special significance to the keyword. In essence, you use it to tell the bots what the text should look like, without emphasizing its content.
  • Conversely, the <strong> code is used to indicate a semantic emphasis of the keyword to the browser. While both elements will display the same on the front end, you can use this code to emphasize how important the phrase or keyword is to the text.

Tips on How to Use Bold for SEO

The best practice for using bold element on your text is for the following instances:

  • Use <strong> tag after headings to highlight the keyword or phrase used in the <H1> or <H2>
  • Use <b> tag to emphasize text that relates to the topic but is not directly linked to the subject.
  • Try not to bold too many keywords in the same paragraph. This rule also relates to bolding entire sentences. You can lose the meaning and significance of the bolded section if you assign meaning to every word.