Should I use bold for the first few sentences of a text?

[mtueckcr]

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?

[AlanMosley]

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

[gfiorelli1]

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.

[fourthdimensioninc]

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.

[RyanKent]

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.

[malachiii]

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.

[StoresDirect]

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.