Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
How many strong tags is too many
-
Hi everyone, just a quick question, what are your views on the use of strong tags in content? how many is too many?
What is you have strong tags around every keywords for a sentance etc?
-
Well yeah that wouldn't be too many at all, but then going back to what Marcus and EGOL said you're much better off using bold tags for readability reasons than simply using it on keywords really. It has little to no impact in terms of rankings (probably a tiny bit) but can have a much greater impact on keeping your visitors moving forward and converting if used to break the content up into more digestible chunks with a good scent of what's important to them and where their eyes should go next.
I'd probably use bold a few more times in a 500 word piece but use it as what it is, an emphasis tag
Not emphasising keywords for Google but whatever it is in the content that will encourage the user to feel they're in the right place... if that happens to combine with some keywords or keyword phrases then great, but don't see it as a game-changer for rankings
-
Its keywords that are bold, so i guess perhaps 1 or 2 for around 500 words would be about right?
-
I suppose if you were going to look at it as "how many is too many" though it would be a percentage density instead of an actual number because it would depend on the size of the piece.
If you had a 1,000 word page then 50 words in bold might look okay but if it were a 100 word page then 50 words in bold would be ridiculous.
-
Exactly (the everything is important bit, not agreeing with me).
-
I agree with Marcus... When you make everything important then nothing is important.
-
If you have to ask that question, I would say you are using too many.
The on page tool looks for one instance of a keyword in either a strong, bold or em tag so if you are doing this for SEO, the prevailing common sense would be that any more than that one is too many.
If the highlighting provides some kind of benefit for your users then you can do more but if you are looking at bolding lots of text for SEO - then forget it.
The best answer is to just use common sense and create something that is readable with the important keyword highlighted if you can do so in a natural way.
Hope it helps.
Marcus
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Will skipping <H> tags affect your SEO?
Will skipping <H> tags on a page have any impact on your SEO, e.g. skipping a <H2> so your page has a <H1> and then goes to a <H3>? Obviously a page must have a <H1>, but does it matter if you skip other headings?
Technical SEO | | ciehmoz0 -
How can i safely eliminate wordpress unused tags?
Hi Over several years I used many tags ( more then 1000 ) on my wordpress website 😞 but most of them haven't any view and haven't any clicks on google search . now I want delete this old - useless - unused tags but I'm worried about seo problem like many 404 pages and problems like this . Does anyone have safe way to delete these wordpress tags? how can i safely remove them?
Technical SEO | | markdoel1 -
How long does it take for canonical tags to work
How long on average does it take for a canonical tag to work? Understand that canonicals are just a suggestion, but after adding a canonical tag and submitting the page via Google fetch, assuming Google follows the canonical, would you expect it to work after a day or two or does it take longer? We added canonicals to old PPC landing pages that are ranking organically, though our new landing pages (which we want to rank organically) are not identical and have a bit more content/features. They are similar though. Canonicals were added to the old pages (pointing to new pages) and requested indexing via search console. Old pages are still ranking and new pages not so much. FYI we are unable to 301 old PPC pages due to other non negotiable reasons unfortunately. Thanks.
Technical SEO | | SoulSurfer80 -
Multiple H1 Tags on Page
Can having multiple H1 tags on a webpage be detrimental to its rankings?
Technical SEO | | AubbiefromAubenRealty0 -
Canonical Tag when using Ajax and PhantomJS
Hello, We have a site that is built using an AJAX application. We include the meta fragment tag in order to get a rendered page from PhantomJS. The URL that is rendered to google from PhantomJS then is www.oursite.com/?escaped_fragment= In the SERP google of course doesnt include the hashtag in the URL. So my question, with this setup, do i still need a canonical tag and if i do, would the canonical tag be the escaped fragment URL or the regular URL? Much Appreciated!
Technical SEO | | RevanaDigitalSEO0 -
Do H2 tags carry more weight than h4 tags?
Of course H tags are key signals for relevance in search. Does an h2 tag send a significantly "louder" signal than an h4 tag?
Technical SEO | | aj6130 -
Will deleting Wordpress tags result in 404 errors or anything?
I want to clean up my tags and I'm worried I'm going to look in my webmasters the next day with hundreds of errors. Whats the best way of doing this?
Technical SEO | | howlusa0 -
Meta tag "noindex,nofollow" by accident
Hi, 3 weeks ago I wanted to release a new website (made in WordPress), so I neatly created 301 redirects for all files and folders of my old html website and transferred the WordPress site into the index folder. Job well done I thought, but after a few days, my site suddenly disappeared from google. I read in other Q&A's that this could happen so I waited a little longer till I finally saw today that there was a meta robots added on every page with "noindex, nofollow". For some reason, the WordPress setting "I want to forbid search engines, but allow normal visitors to my website" was selected, although I never even opened that section called "Privacy". So my question is, will this have a negative impact on my pagerank afterwards? Thanks, Sven
Technical SEO | | Zitana0