Don’t Be Too Bold: Use Bold in Your Text But Be Reasonable
The Old SEO and the New
Remember the web from 10 years ago with bold text, Italicized text, colored text, multiple fonts? Pages could be so busy, they were hard to read. With so many words emphasized, it was difficult to tell which part of the text was important.
We’ve learned a lot about using text for search engines since then.
Write about one topic at a time
Use headings to emphasize important text
Create bullet lists and charts
Write in natural language
Break up text into small chunks (paragraphs)
Use images to reinforce your topic
So writing for the web is more than just putting words on the page. Organization is key to making sense for both site visitors and search engines.
One of the ways to emphasize important words of phrases in your text is to put them in bold.
I’m mentioning this because recently Search Engine Journal quoted Google’s John Mueller on the relationship between bolding and SEO. Here’s what he said:
“So if you want to kind of like simplify it to one word answer, does bolding important points on a paragraph help the SEO, yes it does. It does help us to better understand that paragraph or that page.
”
But that doesn’t mean go wild with bold text.
Formatting Key to Search Engine Optimization
Semantic impact for your page or article relies on signaling the search engines about the importance and relevance of each section on your page.
Here’s a quick review of how everything works together on your page to give strong signals to search engines.
Formatting. Make your entire article easy to read with short paragraphs, headers, subheads, bullet lists, and bolding words for emphasis. When you create small chunks of information organized with headers and lists readers can easily digest and retain those separate pieces of information. Subheads help a reader scan your entire article to verify the information is what they want.
Images. Provide an image to draw attention to your blog post. Keep that attention going with other images about every 450-500 words in a long article. Take your own photos, or use screenshots to illustrate a point. Find rights-free images from sources like Unsplash, Pexels, and Pixabay. Like your titles, make sure your images relate to the content of your blog post.
Key phrase. Repeat up to six times throughout the content of the article.
Related Phrases. Use synonyms and related phrases throughout your article. Search engine artificial intelligence understands the relationships between these phrases. You’ll make it easier for search engines to identify your blog post as content related to a search query.
Length. A blog post can be any length. The best range is somewhere between 500 and 1500 words. Search engines will determine if a long post has filler, so practice making your longer posts related to the main topic by adding pertinent details.
Quotes. Use quotes from relevant experts to add insight. When the expert has a solid social following you add authority to your blog post.
Links. Use the links you identified in your planning stage to guide your blog post readers to a greater depth.
Closing Paragraph. Sum up the main points of your article to help your reader understand the overall point of your article. In my studio, I call it the codpiece because I stuff the important points all together at the end. Then tie it in to your call to action.
Call To Action (CTA). Ask the reader to do something: leave comments, subscribe to your newsletter, follow the blog, or contact you.
Where Does Bold Text Fit In?
Before you start bolding every third word in your text to “help” search engines take notice, read what else John Mueller said about bold text.
“So usually we do try to understand what the content is about on a web page, and we look at different things to try to figure out what is actually being emphasized here, and that includes things like headings on a page.
But it also includes things like what is actually bolded or emphasized within the text on the page. So to some extent that does have a little bit of extra value there, in that it’s a clear sign that actually you think this page or this paragraph is about this topic here.
And usually that aligns with what we think the page is about anyway, so it doesn’t change that much.
”
Bold text isn’t the big signal. Bold text is a signal that this phrase or word is important to the concept or topic of the page, or to the paragraph that is under a heading (H2, H3, etc.).
Bold text is meant to emphasize. And, if you’ve followed great formatting practice, your headers have already emphasized each section of your page.
With correct formatting, you don’t need to use bold font frequently. If you want to give that extra signal boost to search engines with bold text, use it sparingly, perhaps once or twice on the page. That way, you call out important concepts. But, you won’t bewilder your site visitor with multiple bold phrases throughout the page.
Photo by Steve Harvey on Unsplash
