Bold & Italics Best Practice?

[cookie777]

Hi All,

Does anyone know the official best practice use of bold and italic fonts?

If I have a long page of text- 800 words + I usually bold a few sentences to allow the user to be able to read only the bold on the page, and still make sense of the article. By reading all the bold it will kind of make sense and the user gets the point of the article.

This wasn't really done for SEO purposes, but so the reader gets to the bottom of the page in a reasonable amount of time, and gets all the key points and facts of the article.

I was advised not to do this and to just bold/italic the keyword/phrases the article was written to rank for.

I would like to know anyone else's opinion/strategy on using bold/italics effectively and within best practices.

What's the official word?

Thank you for your help. Ian

[LearnInternetGrow]

I am working on an Online Digital Marketing Magazine and many times I am explaining a concept or something about marketing. If I am talking about Topic "A" and I explain what it means and why it is important, I like embolden the topic I am explaining and put the explanation in italics.

In my view, this is for the purpose of skimming the article to pick out the more important parts. Additionally, since the topics being explained are the targeted keywords I figured it would add to SEO, I just hope it doesn't hurt rankings but the ever looming over-optimizing threat. Not sure on any quantitative limits on bold and italicized text but would love to see some numbers on this topic.

I guess I am approaching this with a usability and reader perspective but everyone is different, and I know someone will look at the article and be like oh no why!>?

Please let me know if you think this way or a good reason to stop thinking this way.

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[WhiteboardCreations]

Ian, the use of bold and italic text within pages or articles is so minute to the SEO ranking factors that your best focusing on what really matters for getting ranked. This article can help you see that bold and italic text doesn't even make the list http://a-moz.groupbuyseo.org/search-ranking-factors. Even the H1 tag is 3/4 the way down the list.

Per using bold and italic text for your readers, absolutely! Use it appropriately as it seems you have been doing. Also, consider breaking up content with bullet points or using call out sections in the page (if using WordPress, they have plugins and widgets for these call outs to highlight important content snips).

I'd stray away from bolding singular keywords or italicizing a keyword as those are old, out-dated SEO tactics which were never proven to have any affect, positively or negatively. Keep doing what you're doing and always keep your readers' best interests in mind for them to have a nice experience on your site(s)... Google will see this in the Analytics as they remain on the site/pages longer.

Hope this was helpful. - Patrick

[webmethod]

Hi Ian,

As already covered, there is no official word on using bold and italics improving your SEO that I know of. I also suspect it might be looked upon favourably by Google, but I think it's only ever going to be a minor factor compared to the keyword density in the article and the positioning of the keyword in page headings (H1-H3) and page title.

Personally I think you would create more of an impact by splitting up the article (if possible) under different headings and into managable paragraphs and sentences and testing it using a tool like Flesch Reading Ease, rather than bolding inline sentences/keywords.

George

[Charlessipe]

I think bolding key sentences to help readability is a great way to go. People tend to scan webpages instead of reading every word. I don't think only bolding keywords is wise since it looks really tacky and probably has zero effect on your ranking for the targeted keyword. It might even be considered spammy.

[guillermoga]

Hi Ian,

Bold and anchor text sure helps. But there's really no official word on this.

I would suggest to always stick to what's best for the user. If you think that highlighting the most relevant phrases will help the user get the article much more faster, then stick to it. These way, you will provide a better user experience and probably reduce bounce rate as well. Users won't get bored by too much text and leave.

Also, you don't want to over optimise your site.

Remember to always build your sites for users, not for robots.

Hope it helps!

Guillermo