Fonts and SEO: how to use bold and cursive in the right way
It is quite an old topic, been talked about for over ten years now, but it still happens sometimes that some user asks us: “Is there any difference in the use of the strong and bold HTML tags? And what about between italic and emphasized? How much the use of these font signals can impact on SEO?”. Here is some indications that we hope can clarify the question and reassure both SEO copywriters and editors.
The use of emphasized fonts could influence SEO
Let’s immediately clear the field: there could be a mild value for SEO in using the new strong and emphasized tags, and there surely is a value in terms of usability and readability for people, that with a single glance can detect the part of the text we decided to highlight.
Quickly going back on these tags’ history will allow us to figure out the reason of this claim.
Which ones are the old HTML tags
Since the first absolute steps of HTML code there were some tags useful to give a different text appearance into the browsers display: <b> was the label for bold, <i> the one for italic and <u> was the one for the underline.
More specifically, the <b> bold tag indicates a stylistic and graphic difference of one or multiple words compared to the rest of the text, without though attaching specific signals of importance to these parts.
The <i> italic tag represents a portion of the text in which we would like to express something (like a tone or a mood, for instance) which deviates from the rest of the content, without the adding of other meanings or elements of importance.
The <u> underline tag is instead used to highlight portions of texts and distinguish them from what is near.
On all three cases, we are talking about notes merely valuable from a graphic perspective, that never added particular info on the highlighted words to crawlers.
The strong ed em HTML tags: a semantic value
With the creation of HTML5 and the spreading of the semantic web the b and i tags were definitely deprecated and replaced by new labels: “strong” and “em”. Not only a formal modification, but rather a substantial one: these indications have now a stronger expressive ability and communicate a well-defined meaning, that can be interpreted by search engine crawlers.
What does bold with strong mean
To label one or more terms with the strong tag means to attribute a clear relevance to this text: it is useful to theme the page, can be also used inside headings and could even help to lay emphasis on the keywords we are aiming to with our SEO strategy. It is not a matter of simple visual highlight anymore, but a true and proper signal even search engines are sensitive to, now interpreting that text as semantically important.
What does cursive with em mean
Similar is the meaning of the new <em> tag, useful to emphasize (like the name of the label itself says, indeed, emphasis) a text or a sentence that have a different tone from the rest. On this case too, it is now added a semantic relevance recognized by crawlers, which in turn can assign a different weight to the text portion characterized as such.
The use of strong and em tags for SEO
The choice of deprecating the old <b> and <i> for the benefit of the <strong> and <em> semantical tags offers us some cues for reflection: first of all, it is very useful to have a clear distinction between content and graphic design, by freeing tags from the shaping of the text appearance and leaving them with a more useful task, the one to signal information.
Therefore, using bold or cursive parts we are not only providing an indication for users’ reading (focus your attention on this word or sentence), but we are also launching a message to the browsers, to text-reading tools and crawlers on the relevance those different portions have.
Going back to the starting reasoning, to change tags and favor the semantic ones is a remarkable operation that only gets full sense if we picture it on a (even mild) SEO variation perspective: that is why we can say that entering keywords in bold (obviously strong) could have some positive influence on the ranking of the keywords we are currently working on, even if obviously there are no actual feedbacks that could confirm the hunch.
Whenever the crawler analyzes a page it immediately searches for the most relevant information and then the use of emphasis tags could be a way to provide such indications. Furthermore, well-formatted texts also have a value for the reader, that feels supported in the search for information, and we repeatedly remined you how to write online from an SEO perspective also and mainly means to write for people, not just for robots.
How to use emphasis tags into the text
Lastly, here is some practical advice for the management of text emphasis tags when writing: first of all, for bold we have to use the <strong> tag and avoid the <b> one (totally deprecated by now); likewise, for cursive we will use the <em> tag instead of <i>.
These labels will allow us to highlight keywords or longer tails in order to better strike users‘ attention, give indications to both crawlers and search engines and, possibly, gain a slight advantage in terms of ranking.
Obviously, we do not need to overdo: highlighting in bold long sentences or lots of words makes the text confusing and does not offer any added value, as well as enter cursive on whole periods is not worth much.
Common sense must remain the compass guiding our work: the text has to be optimized in order to ease reading and comprehension, because this truly means to invest on quality and produce a content that could be appreciated both by users and search engines.
