Bold text and search engine optimization

Google claims to look at at least 100 factors when calculating search engine rankings. The most important elements are likely to be link text, title tags, body copy, and headers. Bold text is of less importance, however it is likely to be one of the factors used to evaluate rankings.

In a web page or any document for that matter, bold text simply indicates emphasis or importance. Bold text draws your attention, and presumably the attention of a search engine. When used effectively, bold text can help to increase conversion rates by drawing your visitors attention to important elements of the copy on your web pages. It helps them move through your site more quickly by facilitating skimming and scanning through a website. Keywords in bold text may help to increase the relevancy of a web page for those keywords contained in bold text.

It is really easy to implement bold text within your web pages. All you need to do is enclose the text you want to bold in opening and closing HTML tags.

If you wanted to make the phrase search engine optimization bold on one of your web pages, you would simply enclose the phrase search engine optimization in between opening and closing bold tags. The code would look like this:

<b>search engine optimization</b>

The end result would look like this:

search engine optimization

Bold text is no magic bullet for attaining top search engine rankings but it can make a slight difference, particularly when it contains your keywords. Bold text is most valuable when used to highlight important words, phrases, or ideas that may be of particular importance to your visitors. Web page headers may in fact be a better choice, especially when reformatted to better fit within your web page layout using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). Learn more about headers in the web page headers article.

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