Today, Google’s Search Advocate, John Mueller, conducted his regular English Google SEO session on YouTube. One of the amusing highlights was the discussion that bold text can boost your SEO. With a wry smile JohnMu answered:
“Someone was arguing that bolding important parts in a paragraph can boost your SEO.
Does it?
I think this is something that comes up every now and then. I double-checked before the session actually and Matt Cutts did a video in 2012 or something around that, about bolding a strong and on pages.
So usually, we do try to understand what the content is about on the webpage and we look at different things to try and figure out what is actually being emphasised here.
And that includes things like headings on a page, but it also includes things like what is actually bolded or emphasised 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 about the page anyway so it doesn’t change that much.
The other thing is that this is, to a large extent, relative within the web page. So if you go off and say I will just make my whole page bold and then Google will think my page is the most important one, then by making everything bold, essentially, nothing is bold because it’s all the same.
Whereas if you take a handful of sentences or words within your full page where you say this is really important for me and you bold those, then it’s a lot easier for us to say here’s a lot of text and this is potentially one of the most important points on the page.
And we can give that a little bit more value and essentially, what that kind of goes into is everything around semantic HTML where you’re giving a little bit more meaning to a page by using the proper markup for the page and from our point of view that’s good, it helps us top understand the page a little bit better.
Soi if you want to simplify it to a one word answer, does bolding important points on a paragraph help SEO?
Yes, it does. It helps us better understand that paragraph or that page.”
SEO Best Practice: bold text.
Using bold mark-up helps to emphasize text. It is stronger and more visible than italicised text and should be used to recommend or highlight key words in a body of copy that a reader will find particularly useful.
This is particularly useful for making key words stand out for readers who are “skimming” the text.
Bold text should be used sparingly, and as both an aesthetic as well as a tool to help readers. Bold-faced text should be part of a clear structure of a web page, as it would be in a clearly marked up print page.
Other typographic and layout methods should be used such as a logical hierarchy of headings and subheadings from a single h1 to as many h2, h3 tags as are appropriate, plus italics, bullet points, indentation and quotations as appropriate.
Basically, don’t overdo the bold text, you’re using it to help web page readers and by doing so the search engines hold recognise that.
