Keyword Use in Bold or Strong Tags

Ever had one of those days when your homework assignment was returned to you and it had this bold, nasty letter (encircled at the right side of the paper) proclaiming grades you were ashamed to show your parents? Did you ever receive junk mails that stated you won their raffle and that in order to claim it you must ‘act immediately?’ Have you read cartoon strips where one character was portrayed making a point by having his thought-balloon words all capitalized and bold-faced?

If you say no to all three questions, I’m going to have to ask you, “Are you kidding me?”

Printed words can have personalities too, you know. This is quite evident in the text messages and chat languages we use. Bold faced and strong (italicized fonts) are usually typed in when you wish to emphasize a point, to denote anger, or just to call someone else’s attention. This also holds true in web page building, although some builders give it little or no importance.

Bold and strong tags are like headers or beacons: they are effective eye-catchers. If a site visitor is scanning, and something in the text piques his attention, he is more likely to spend time reading your page. By focusing the reader’s attention at a tag, or texts that are separate from the main body of thought, you are actually insinuating that these texts are really important. Of course it would help if the attention-grabbing text had a good follow through. Otherwise, the surfer quickly loses interest.

Some surfers rely on such matching tags or keywords on search engine result pages (SERP). But not all search engines (SE) give importance to these bold-faced, strong-faced keywords. More significance is of course given to the main title, or the main header (h1), which is usually the description of the page.

Although such tags blatantly broadcast the website’s position on a number of things, some net aficionados think that it has more effect on the appeal to the readers than the site’s rankings in SEs. No one usually carries out keyword-emphasizing tactics in order to rank higher in SERPs, or else, any tag (no matter how insipid) can become a huge ranking factor. Although some tags may inevitably (or rather, doubtfully) influence its ranking in the SERP, the webpage maker must use some really cunning schemes in order to do so. There are actually no physical or virtual evidence that such schemes work. As to why anyone would spend that much time in promoting particular keywords is anyone’s guess. Thirty-seven leaders in SEO, though, consider keyword use in bold or strong tags a moderately important factor affecting rankings in Google.

As a web builder, you are at liberty to bold-face any keyword or tag you wish. You can italicize your h1’s and h2’s and h3’s to your heart’s content. Unfortunately, some websites (Google, for one) don’t share your belief in the same principle.