Claim: Keywords should be put in Bold Text.
Status: Not Supported
Some optimization experts and software optimizers claim that pages gain positioning for a keyword if the keyword is
put in bold text. On this theory, a page that has the word widgets in bold font a few times in the text, will have a
higher search engine position for "widgets" than an equivalent page where "widgets" is not in bold.
Examination of top pages retrieved for various keywords found no evidence for this in Google. It might be true in
some search engines. In Google it seems to hurt, if anything. Of course, if the keyword is part of an <H1> heading text,
it will be displayed in bold, and the page may gain positioning because of the use of the word in the <H1> header.
One problem with the bold text for SEO belief - There are numerous ways of making a word appear as bold text in the
code. To optimize rationally, the search engine spider would have to use all of them. For example, the <B> tag and the
<STRONG> tag will both display bold text, and so will selecting Arial Bold font, and so will a css style that specifies
Bold text, and so will the "font weight" directive in a style. Remember that search engines are machines and that they
must work quickly to cover and rank all those billions of Web pages.
