How many strong tags is too many
-
Hi everyone, just a quick question, what are your views on the use of strong tags in content? how many is too many?
What is you have strong tags around every keywords for a sentance etc?
-
Well yeah that wouldn't be too many at all, but then going back to what Marcus and EGOL said you're much better off using bold tags for readability reasons than simply using it on keywords really. It has little to no impact in terms of rankings (probably a tiny bit) but can have a much greater impact on keeping your visitors moving forward and converting if used to break the content up into more digestible chunks with a good scent of what's important to them and where their eyes should go next.
I'd probably use bold a few more times in a 500 word piece but use it as what it is, an emphasis tag Not emphasising keywords for Google but whatever it is in the content that will encourage the user to feel they're in the right place... if that happens to combine with some keywords or keyword phrases then great, but don't see it as a game-changer for rankings
-
Its keywords that are bold, so i guess perhaps 1 or 2 for around 500 words would be about right?
-
I suppose if you were going to look at it as "how many is too many" though it would be a percentage density instead of an actual number because it would depend on the size of the piece.
If you had a 1,000 word page then 50 words in bold might look okay but if it were a 100 word page then 50 words in bold would be ridiculous.
-
Exactly (the everything is important bit, not agreeing with me).
-
I agree with Marcus... When you make everything important then nothing is important.
-
If you have to ask that question, I would say you are using too many.
The on page tool looks for one instance of a keyword in either a strong, bold or em tag so if you are doing this for SEO, the prevailing common sense would be that any more than that one is too many.
If the highlighting provides some kind of benefit for your users then you can do more but if you are looking at bolding lots of text for SEO - then forget it.
The best answer is to just use common sense and create something that is readable with the important keyword highlighted if you can do so in a natural way.
Hope it helps.
Marcus
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
-
No H1 tag in wordpress, what are the implications?
When checking my blog posts I noticed that they don't contain any H1 tags. This confused me as I'd heard that wordpress automatically puts H1 tags on your blog post titles. Is this something that might negatively affect my rankings? If an H1 tag is absent, does the H2 tag take center stage so to speak? Is this something my wordpress theme does and how can I fix it? Cheers! Anton
Technical SEO | | antonshakr0 -
Canonical tag refers to itself (???)
Greetings Mozzers. I have seen a couple of pages that use canonical tags in a peculiar way, and I wanted to know if this way of using the tags was correct, harmless or dangerous: What I've seen is that on some pages like: www.example.com/page1 There's a canonical tag in the header that looks like this link href="http://ww.example.com/page1" rel="canonical" It looks as though the tag is "redirecting to itself", this seems useless (at least to me). Is there a case where this is actually a recommended practice? Will using the canonical tag in this way "hurt" the page's ranking potential? Cheers Jorge
Technical SEO | | Masoko-T0 -
Are Tags in Blogs good?
Hi Is adding tags into Blogs a good idea? Does it help with SEO at all? For example blog/?tag=/Invoicing-Software Will that help us get ranked for Invoicing Software? Regards Andrew
Technical SEO | | Studio330 -
Title Tags & Url Structure
So I'm working on a website for a client in the Tourism Industry. We've got a comprehensive list of museums & other attractions in a number of cities that have to go online. And we have to come up with the correct url structure, title tags and obviously content. My current line of thought was to work the urls in the following way. http://domain.com/type-of-attraction/city/name-of-attraction/ This is mainly because we think that the type of attraction is far more important then the city (SEO wise) as the country as a whole receives more searches, however we require a city in the url to make it unique because some attractions across cities happen to share names and we don't want to have the names of attractions littered with city names. However for title-tags I wanted to go the other way around, again due to the attraction type being more important then the city. Name of Attraction - Type of Attraction - City - Brand Name or Name of Attraction - Type of Attraction in City - Brand Name I am quite confident in working it this way; however I would appreciate if I receive some feedback on this structure, you think its good or you would make any suggestions / alterations. One last thing, There's the possibility of having many urls ending up with the same city names (For each type of attraction) I would think that just providing a list of links & duplicate text is not enough; would you suggest a canonical pointing to a link containing just information on the city? and using the other pages for user-navigation only? or should i set variables in the text which are replaced by the types of attraction so that the text looks different for each one?
Technical SEO | | jonmifsud0 -
H-tags and Page Name best practice
For the past few months I've been working on a new site launch, but have been left with a couple of annoyances from my predecessor.. I've got a couple of questions about best practise (and if it's worth changing now). For reference, a good example page is http://polestars.net/hen-party/life-drawing-hen-party/ H-tags The (external) web designer has insisted that wrapping the logo in an H1 tag (with the same branded H1 text on every page), and using an H2 for the actual title of the page is fine. I really don't believe him, but at the same time, feel like maybe google is smart enough to discern the theme of a page in this structure. Is it worth having this changed so that the actual title is the first H1? Page naming convention Another annoyance that I've been left with is the fact that every product page is named the same "burlesque hen party", "life drawing hen party", "whatever hen party"... It looks a little weird, but my real concern is that as we now have 60 "hen party" links in the navigation menu of a bunch of our pages, this may be seen as keyword stuffing - is this a real concern, or am I overthinking it?
Technical SEO | | AlecPR0 -
Too many on page links
Hello I have about 800 warnings with this. Example of one url with this problem is: http://www.theprinterdepo.com/clearance?dir=asc&order=price I was checking and I think all links are important. But I suppose that if I put a nofollow on the links on the left which are only for navigation purposes I can get rid of these warnings. Any other idea?
Technical SEO | | levalencia10 -
Canonical tags/wordpress permalink question
Need help: Do canonical tags do the exact same thing that wordpress already does with it’s permalink function? Or are these 2 separate things? thank you.
Technical SEO | | bonnierSEO1 -
Title Tag won't update
The Home page Title Tag on my Wordpress CMS Website doesn't update. It has the Thesis Theme and All in One SEO plugin. I've updated it exactly the same on the Home page, for SEO plugin, and in the Thesis Theme - but still it displays the old one.. The site was last cached about a week ago - 3X since I've been attempting to change it. The other page's Title Tags update instantly when updated, but not the Home page. I've been digging for a solution and can't seem to find an answer. What could be the problem? (www.austinfitnessgyms.com -It should be: Austin Gym | Kickboxing in Austin | Impact MMA Fitness)
Technical SEO | | OhYeahSteve0