Bolded key words

**frobn** · 03-21-2005, 07:29 AM

Many SEO agents recommend the use of the tag around key words. Has anyone found this effective? I personally do not like to see a lot of bold text.

**San Diego Real Estate** · 04-06-2005, 09:07 PM

frobn...I think that it is a matter of opinion...although I agree!

**chachi** · 04-06-2005, 11:28 PM

Yes, it is a good idea. Using heading tags that contain keywords or parts of them (<h1>, <h2>, etc) and italics or bold tags around your keywords are really basic SEO techniques that everyone should employ when creating pages and content for their sites.

**Shimmer** · 04-23-2005, 12:27 PM

Many SEO agents recommend the use of the tag around key words. Has anyone found this effective? I personally do not like to see a lot of bold text.

does it work????

**HHI Golf Guy** · 04-23-2005, 10:29 PM

The bold tag has been deprecated in the last few years in both HTML and XHTML. Although browsers still read this tag, the accepted tag is now .

**frobn** · 05-01-2005, 05:19 PM

Originally Posted by Shimmer

Many SEO agents recommend the use of the tag around key words. Has anyone found this effective? I personally do not like to see a lot of bold text.

does it work????

I finally researched the topic. What I learned was a bit surprising. First, I agree the proper tag should be and not . There is a consensus that SEs favor a hierarchical approach using header tags and most likely other tags for emphasis. Not surprising, as this is how many of us learned to build web sites. Here are some points I found.

1. h1, as expected has the highest weight, nearly as high as title. It should be used only one time per page with your main key words. Additional usage, will devalue it.

2. h2, h3, etc have less weight and also should be used sparingly

3. emphasizing words and phases with , and colors, add value but should be used sparingly.

4. there is some evidence that SEs consider overuse of header and strong tags as spam.

Rule of thumb: use them when they make sense for your visitors.

**sarahk** · 05-01-2005, 08:20 PM

Each search engine will have programmed their spider differently so we can't ever know exactly how they approach your site but we do know certain things - and they're all pretty logical.

Think like a computer program (ok, don't kill me for this)

but it gets a stack of text and the words don't mean anything. It has a dictionary which says that there are noise words to ignore like and, the, it

but then it comes across a new word being repeated over and over. Is it a useful word or is it just a noise word in this site's language. Ooooh, look it uses etc with these words but never for that frequent word so I guess the site is about the words and I can ignore the noise word.

So next time you see a site which uses the word florida in every sentence you can have a laugh. They've probably just created a noise word in that site's context.

If I have a phrase I want to be bold but not indexed as important I'll use and use the stylesheet to control the look. This way it should be ignored.

On the other hand I might have a phrase which is important but I don't want it to be bold. I might make it or and use the stylesheet to change it back to plain text.

Alternatively if it's an acronym I'll use the <acronym> tag to explain it and hope that it also shows the spider that the phrase is important too.

But first the spider has to find your site.

I come across sites that work perfectly well but they're actually throwing 500 errors and the like and that will be offputting for a nicely behaved spider.
and then it has to wade through spammy meta tags
and then it has the javascript and styles on the page which don't help.
and if you use dreamweaver or frontpage there is probably a big fat body onload event to preload all those mouse over images which will cause havoc with my regular expressions and might make me misread a page
and on every navbar hyperlink I might have to wade through the javascript controlling the mouseover - crazy really when the stylesheet will do it for you
if you don't know how to use styles properly then the spider has to wade through acres of class definitions or worse, inpage style definitions
and I possibly have to cope with hyperlinks such as ../stuff.html
and if the old idea of a 12k limit for googlebot is true then after all of that it might have run out of steam and not even got to anything decent.

ummm, that's a bit of a brain dump, hope it makes sense and helps...

Sarah

**Real Estate Forum** · 05-02-2005, 05:06 AM

Very interesting comments, guys. This:

Originally Posted by HHI Golf Guy

The bold tag has been deprecated in the last few years in both HTML and XHTML. Although browsers still read this tag, the accepted tag is now .

is something not many know, so like they say: "You hear it here first "

I can only encourage anyone to use <h> tags. I believe those help in ALL search engines.

**Bazkaz** · 05-05-2005, 11:24 PM

I would have to agree that using tags (sparingly!) does help.

Obviously you don't want your whole page in bold or anything like that.

**frobn** · 05-06-2005, 02:31 PM

The reason has was deprecated in favor of was for accessibility> If someone is hearing the web page as opposed to seeing it "B" has no meaning but "strong" does, likewise for to .

Here are a couple links for those who are looking for good reasons to use standards and have accessible web sites:

http://www.webstandards.org/learn/faq/

http://www.w3.org/WAI/bcase/benefits.html