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Do Keywords in Bold or Italic help to increase search rank?



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Do Keywords in Bold or Italic help to increase search rank?

Some webmasters claim putting your keywords in bold or putting your keywords in italics may be a useful ranking factor in terms of search engine optimizing a page.

It's more true now than ever, that search engines value pages in the same way humans would (and do). If you publish a page that has very good content, then you will almost always be rewarded with higher search rankings. And, a big part of any good content is being able to be easily accessed or read by the person using your site. In other words, ease of use. To this finish, putting necessary words and phrases in bold or italics can make your pages easier to read.

Moreover, an oversized element of search engine rankings is links to your page from different influential websites. When you make pages easier to read, you’ll be raising the user's level of expertise and so increasing the chance that many will be linking back to your page. This indirect technique will increase search engine rankings (SEO) and is the solely method I feel bold and italics can have an effect on your page.

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TommyCarey
I've noticed a lot of people doing this. I think it's because sometimes they'll see a bold keyword that is actually becoming bold because of a header tag and they think they should do that on all of their keywords in the content of the pages.

Sure it helps, but not if abused for each and every keyword lol Do Keywords in Bold or Italic help to increase search rank?

If you want to bold something, use your header tags and bold a topic/section/title line and not 25 keywords inside your content. Making the content user friendly and easily readable is much better than bolding or italicizing every third word Do Keywords in Bold or Italic help to increase search rank?

Now I'm not saying you shouldn't use bold and italics inside your content, just use it sparingly and where it's needed. Want to quote something? Then make it italicized so that it stands out a little more and people understand it's a quote if they miss the "quote" marks.


Just like beer, use bold and italics responsibly Do Keywords in Bold or Italic help to increase search rank?


Thanks,

Razzy



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ajlancer
Yes Razzy I agree with your points like use your header tags and bold a topic/section/title line and not 25 keywords inside your content. But I think each content has to main targeting keyword only 2 or 3 that can be bold and italicized and another option may underline as idealmike said. And my main point was a part of having an excellent online page is that the content is easily expendable by readers by bold/italic/underline. Putting necessary words and phrases in bold or italics can make your pages easier to read. And I like your another idea for using italic as instead of quote marks.

Thanks by Ajlancer



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EliteWriter
I think that the main benefit is for the readers. Such formatting helps them to read through content more easily, and they are likely to understand it better too. Since the content strikes the right balance between readability and information, one is more likely to share it. This will in turn help in various ways of course. Therefore there is nothing to lose to use bold, italics and underlining as long as one does not overdo it, and then end up losing their effect altogether. Sometimes you find sites that do this, such as all the content is bold. That is useless and quite disconcerting to me.



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vinaya
I don't think having the keywords in boldface helps in increasing rank unless you are using H1 and H2 tags. However, if you are using too many boldface keywords, search engines might get confused and might even consider spam. Having too many boldface keywords also deters the readers.



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Corzhens
Do you really think that the font of the letters is evaluated by the search engine for purposes of the ranking? We may be guessing but ny take on the issue is that the letters are just letters and does not matter if it is in boldface or italicized. But maybe there will be more comments that can give a specific answer.



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