Does it still help to bold text on webpages to draw the attention of the search engine bots?
-
I remember a few years ago, bolding text was important for the search bots, is this still the case?
-
Fantastic real life test and observation. Highly appreciated!
-
Hi Augustos,
Yes, bounce rate is now acknowledged as a ranking factor by major search engines.
I would say you are probably doing exactly what I talked about in my response to Volkinator - are your conversion rates also improved?
Sha
-
Hi Volkinator,
I would actually offer a slightly different perspective on this.
I agree that there doesn't appear to be any real evidence that it helps rankings, but...
Think about what works for the visitor ... clever use of bold text can actually help conversions, but you have to think carefully about what you are doing because it can also hurt them terribly if misused.
First, highlighting just repetitive keyword terms or long sections of text is likely to hurt in 2 ways:
- It is likely to annoy people and therefore increase the bounce rate for the page.
- long passages of bold text reduce comprehension dramatically - if people don't understand the text on the page they are less likely to convert.
However, you can highlight just short phrases in the text to send a direct message to the reader. This will drive your message home more effectively and increase conversions.
This is an artificially constructed version to demonstrate what I am talking about, but in essence, the highlighted phrases when read alone create a shorter, more direct action statement from within the two longer sentences.
I have found this to be quite effective in improving conversions on client sites. One site in particular went from a conversion rate of 2.2% to a conversion rate of 26% after making only this change.
Hope that helps,
Sha
-
I remember a few years ago, bolding text was important for the search bots, is this still the case?
Only when your competitors are naive and easy.
In any other situation you are in a battle of resources.
-
The pages I used bolding text, I can't see any rank boost but the bounce rate normally decrease in a good amount.
So here is the question, is bounce rate matter for ranking?
-
I did some test once, and i could not see anything worth noting
-
Thanks, I looked there before postign and didn't see anything specific to bolding text
-
It is still known to help, but to a generally small degree. You can see all the ranking factors in the latest study here.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Can Google+ help you to rank?
I'm thinking about uploading photos to my Google+ and then embedding them in my post. Will adding photo from Google+ help me rank better.
Content Development | | WilCross1 -
Loads of Blog Search Results showing up in SERPs - What's the best way to remove?
Our client has a good number of results showing up in SERPs that are search results pages produced by Blog posts. Unfortunately all these results have exactly the same Title tag and it has nothing to do with the blog content which means they are unlikely to help us much. We can’t create a 301 redirect because there is no page to redirect. There is no blog page we can re=canonical to either. The content on these pages is a short list of blog posts by each author. They are not true “Author” pages that would have a URL structure like this: your company.com/author/joeblow Our plan is to use GWMT's URL removal tool to request remove of these pages. (and then try to stop new results from being created) We are doing this to get low-value content out of the SERP. Is there a better way to remove these search results? Any drawback in removing them in GWMTs? Thanks.
Content Development | | RosemaryB1 -
Starting a brand new blog today - Is it still Wordpress?
Hi I started a blog in 2006 on Blogspot, then everyone moved onto Tumblr and Wordpress, but in August (just) 2013, what should I be starting my brand new blog on? I dont want to have to migrate in a matter on months.
Content Development | | xoffie0 -
I want to swop a site to an existing domain. i.e. it was http://A.com and now want it to be B.com...please help
The company I have started working for as two main websites. The main website (A) is out of date and not very functional but has the companies prime domain name. The other site (B) has their ecommerce engine. I'd like to make B the prime site i.e. take over A's domain name. Huge warning bells are going off regarding the SEO of this decision. Any advice or suggestions in how to go about this without destroying the company's SEO would be greatly valued.
Content Development | | SoutherlySwell0 -
Need help deciding how to display directory listings in way Google will like best
My blog site currently has maybe 100 posts and I do about 7-8 new a week. I am creating a directory for an this site, which will end up eventually being a few hundred or more entries eventually. In the directory browse/search listing, each directory listing will have a title and a short description (one or two lines) and will show about 10-20 per page. And then the user can click an entry to see more details for the particular directory listing. This is where I have a choice, and I want to know what is the best for my site, in Google's eyes of course. Options: 1. The listing detail is displayed on a separate page. 2. The listing detail is displayed below the entry that was clicked, on the same page, by use of jquery to slide down the other content blow it to make room for it. (It actually looks slick, I've tried it). If I were writing full, unique pages for each listing detail, I'd choose option #1. But the vendors are submitting the content. It's possible they might just copy and paste their site's About page into it, or they might not even add any more detail other than their address. I can't control it. So, if going with option #1, let's say a third of the vendors add nice unique content, a third paste in some dup content, and a third just leave it blank (there would still be an address, couple line short description, and a title on the page). Would this situation be good, not good or neutral for my site? I'm not sure if adding additional pages, maybe half to two-thirds of which could be somewhat duped or of minimal word length would be bad or neutral for my site overall. As for my existing and ongoing blog pages--they are all unique, long and Google seems to love them.
Content Development | | bizzer0 -
Google still caching old site
Hi all, We just acquired a new domain that was being squatted on by a reseller for a very long time and on the 5th June migrated our site over to it, replacing their advertising holding page. The domain is http://primate.co.uk It's been a week now though and Google hasn't seemed to have updated it's cache. Doing a search for 'primate.co.uk' in Google lists the site but with the old holding page description. Web master tools doesn't report any errors or issues with the site. Does anyone know how we can get Google to index the domain and update it's cache? Cheers, Gordon
Content Development | | Primate0 -
Are post tags on blogs still useful?
Hello I have a number of sites on Wordpress which all still use the post tag feature. Is this something that I should really be avoiding due to duplicate content issues in the url's of the site, or is it still something that can help SEO wise? I only ask as I did a crawl diagnostics report on SEOmoz and it found that 48 of my title elements were too short due to these tags in the URL's. If you do all suggest I keep using them, should they be 3 odd words which are keywords? Thanks in advance.
Content Development | | mozUser14692366292850 -
Changing Text on Pages
For one of my sites I'm in a situation where I have 6 main pages that are for lack of a better word "showcased," one of which being the homepage. The problem is that I am seeing pretty good traffic growth, but my conversions/sales are really weak, and I'm about 95% positive that this is because there is too much information on all of those pages --- each one has about 1500 words or so. The site architecture and link structure on the site is good as out of the couple of hundred pages on the site only 3 of them aren't indexed according to Google webmaster tools. What I want to do is rewrite the text on those six main pages with more of a sales type of feel and limit them to 500-700 words or so. This will have no impact on the link architecture whatsoever, but I'm a bit worried that it will have a negative impact on my continual traffic growth. Actually, I'm not as much concerned about the continual part as the steady new content stream should take care of it, but I would be very concerned if I lost the rankings that I have right now. Granted, those rankings aren't worth as much as they could be because conversions are down, so so it's kind of a catch-22. The question is, how dangerous is what I'm planning on doing? On a side note, my lack of conversions has nothing to do with my description or title tags that show up in the results as they are targeted properly and written for sales. The problem is that the pages, though rich in content, are a bit too rich in content and need to be fixed to work in unison with the descriptions and titles.
Content Development | | RussNauta0