Should I use bold for the first few sentences of a text?
-
I would like to know if anyone knew if the relevance of a page changes if I bold the first few sentences. Our journalist wants to bold the first few sentences in every article to make it easier to read, how does that affect SEO?
-
go for it, I agree with Stores, it will help rather then hinder.
I set up a test to see just how well bold helped keywords, the test were inconculsive, I suggest it has only mild benefit. i believe SEOMoz has shown the same.
What you suggest is quite natural, iwould tr5y to get the guts of the subject into that paragraph
-
Bold as a very few correlation with rankings. Therefore use bold naturally, as a way to those users who scan the page and don't read it word by word to understand exactly what the page is about (therefore bolding the main kw is surely justified) and intrigue them so to stop and read more campy the page and stay on it and on the site more time during its visit. Bold or enhance the call to actions.
-
i agree wit the sentiments above. Bolded keywords is said to be a best practice, but in moderation. if all the words are bolded, then the crawler must assume that no one word is more important than the next.
If you are looking for that bolded look, a simple
tag will help you achieve the same aesthetic.
hope that helps you, and good luck.
-
Google's algorithm is not known to us so we are left to guess. There could be some case studies but even so, the algorithm changes around 500 times per year so it is impossible to know for sure.
My best guess is, all forms of attention grabbing on a page such as bold and italics are put in a bucket which share the weighting bonus. If you have only a couple words on a page appear in bold, then all the weight would apply to those couple words. If you present the entire page in bold, then all terms would be treated equally.
My normal recommendation would be to use bold for the most important words, or the most relevant ones. If you feel the design of the page improves by using bold text on the first couple of sentences, consider changing the text color instead. I have seen some creative results in this regard but don't have any examples to share.
-
I would keep and _tags for specific keywords, sentences, quotes, etc. However, if it is for purely cosmetic reasons your editor wants to bold the first sentences, it should be an easy CSS hack that will help the visual aspects of the content be seen. _
Remember to incorporate best practices into all your code and remember how the content is being crawled.
-
Well written content introduces the main topic within the first few sentences, so should contain the most important keywords anyway. Emboldening those sentences will add a little weighting to their content so this should help your SEO rather than hinder it.
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
-
Using a hyphen in title tags and the impact of spaces
Hi I am trying to arrive at a best practice template for a title tag for my organization so does the following template still holds Primary Keyword - Secondary Keyword | Brand Name will anything be impacted if I eliminate the spaces between the hyphen, will search bots be still able to treat the first one as a priority and the second as the secondary? Primary Keyword-Secondary Keyword | Brand Name thank you
On-Page Optimization | | lina_digital0 -
Background Images and ALT text
We pretty much exclusively use background images for our sites. How do I add in alt text? I tried a Google search for this issue and the best answer I could find was "Use the 'title' tag in the containing div", but that was from 2010. Is there a better way to do it? And no, we're not going to switch to using standard images, because background images are way more slick for UX.
On-Page Optimization | | MichaelGregory0 -
Use of the word Find in Title Tags
Hey, So i'm looking to make content that is optimized for Finding an injury lawyer in boston. The Phrase "Personal Injury Lawyers in Boston" get's a lot more searches than "Find Personal Injury Lawyers in Boston" but with the Find is it less competitive? The same thing goes for "Find lawyers in Boston" vs. "Lawyers in Boston." My question is, is it better to put the word FInd in front or not? Is there a downside?
On-Page Optimization | | RafeTLouis0 -
Ecommerce- Keyword use in Product links on Category page
I'm wondering how Keyword use in Product links on Category pages can affect a pages rank? I have 1 site where this seems to be an issue but not on all categories. For this site, a site: keyword search ranks the category page as no.1 in the SERPS but a non-site: search shows 1 of the many products within the category as the highest ranking page (currently 20 in google) on this site. This product is probably the least likely to generate a conversion due to it's cost so this is less than ideal. The plural search of the keyword shows the category page and it ranks higher than the keyword itself (currently 9 in google) Category name and URL = keyword. The category is paginated with 12 products per page. Product URL and anchor text is brand-model-type (where type = keyword) I'd like to keep the product URLs and anchors as they are if I can as they are well searched terms themselves but I want to optimize a category page to rank for the keyword itself. Have any of you overcome a similar issue? Would adding more text to the category page dilute the issue?
On-Page Optimization | | MarcOZ0 -
Why isn't our site being shown on the first page of Google for a query using the exact domain, when its pages are indeed indexed by Google
When I type our domain.com as a query into Google, I only see one of our pages on the homepage, and it's in 4th position. It seems though, that all pages of the site are indexed by google when I type in the query "site:domain.com". There was an issue at the site launch, where the robots.txt file was left active for around two weeks. Would this have been responsible for the fact that another domain ranks #1 when we type in our own domain? It has been around a couple of months now since the site was launched. Thanks in advance.
On-Page Optimization | | featherseo0 -
Which is better to use: apostrophe version or non-apostrophe version?
When targeting a keyword phrase that contains an apostrophe (in the correct spelling), is it better to use the non-apostrophe version if it has higher search volume.
On-Page Optimization | | ProjectLabs0 -
How impactful will text at the bottom of the page be?
If the most important content for humans on my page is images (e.g., a picture gallery), but there is very little text high up on the page, how impactful will a text description at the bottom of the page be? I've seen a few other sites put content paragraphs at the bottom of their pages. LIke so: http://www.purpletrail.com/invitations-online http://www.tinyprints.com/ Is this something I would do well to emulate?
On-Page Optimization | | Ehren0 -
How many times to use keyword
So if I have my main site, blog and article directory section, can I use keyword in all three places, but obviously different, unique content? And if so, can I link them to make it even more powerful?
On-Page Optimization | | azguy0
