There’s no one key that unlocks a winning search engine optimization (SEO) strategy. Instead, there are best practices and tips you have to master to make the most of your traffic from search.
Google’s Search Advocate John Mueller recently provided insight on one of these tips — using bolded text within your content. It may seem simple, but it can actually have an impact on how Google crawls your page. Mueller chatted about the topic during a Google Search Central SEO office-hours hangout. He said that, when used correctly, bolded text can provide added context about your site to Google.
“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.”
Mueller points out that it’s important to only bold text when it makes sense within the context of an article. For example, it can be handy to bold certain important points, headlines, and subheadings within your content.“
The other thing is that this is, to a large extent, relative within the webpage. So if you go off and say, well 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 well here’s a lot of text, and this is potentially one of the most important points of this 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 to understand the page a little bit better.”
How to Easily Bold Text on RebelMouse
RebelMouse makes it easy to bold the elements of your content quickly.
As a best practice, headlines on RebelMouse are bolded by default.
To bold subheadings, highlight the text you want to bold, and then click the capitalized B that appears in the formatting toolbar above your content.
Similarly, If you want to bold text within the body of your article, highlight the targeted text and click the same capitalized B button in the formatting toolbar that appears above.
How to Bold Custom Fields
RebelMouse’s Entry Editor is customizable to meet the needs of your content team. If you are using Custom Fields to make the most of our editing experience, those elements can be easily bolded as well.
In the Advanced Settings tab of the right-hand navigation bar in Entry Editor, you will see the ability to set the formatting of your Custom Fields.
If your custom field has rich text enabled, click the capitalized B to bold the text of your Custom Fields as needed. When using HTML, use the following tags to bold your text:
<strong>I need this text to be bold.</strong>
Here's how those examples look in the Entry Editor:
Here’s how the same examples look when published:
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