The Importance of Bold and Strong Tags in SEO

If you’re doing some research on on-site SEO techniques, you’ll probably find many articles claiming that putting keywords in bold (by using <B> and strong <STRONG> HTML tags) and italic (<I> and <EM> tags) has a positive impact on web pages’ rankings.

But is that true? Will you improve your Google rankings by simply bolding targeted keywords?

Keep reading to know the answer of these questions.

Definition of BOLD / STRONG and ITALIC/em tags?

There are 4 very common HTML elements, that people use to style in bold or italic text within HTML documents:

• <b> and <strong> display the content in bold and
• <i> and  <em> usually display it in italic.

It’s very easy to apply any of those. The text you want to change goes between the two tags:

<b>your text here</b>

<strong>your text here</strong>

In these two examples, the browser will display the text in the same way – in bold.

That’s why many webmasters, who are not HTML savvy, use these elements as substitutes (<b> instead of <strong> or <strong> instead of <b>).

Difference between <b> / <strong> and <i> / <em> tags

Although they have the same effect, the HTML elements <b> and <strong> and <i> and <em> are not exactly the same.

• <b> and <i> are used to define bold and italic text, without any extra importance. Basically they are telling the browser what the text should look like, without emphasizing its content.
• <strong> and <em>  are used to define a semantic emphasis.
• <strong> defines bold text, with added semantic “strong” importance.
• <em> defines emphasized text, with added semantic importance.

In other words, these HTML elements are telling us that the text is important.

<b> and <i> and defines bold and italic text, but <strong> and <em> means that the text is “important”.

W3C

• <b> and <i> will tell the browser what the text should look like while
• <strong> and <em> indicate a semantic emphasis, which can be conveyed by screen readers for people with accessibility issues.

How Google treats BOLD, STRONG, and Italic tags?

Google treats the <b> <strong> tags and <em> and <i> tags in the same way in terms of ranking and how pages are indexed.

In a video from 2006,  Matt Cutts said that there was no difference in how Google treats the <strong> and the <b> tag when it came to ranking, scoring, or other search factors.

In a more recent video, from the end of 2013, he came back to the same question, saying that “Things might have changed since 2006, but I really kind of doubt it”. He added the same is true for or the <em> and <i> tags.

 http:// https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=awto_wCeO

Are BOLD, STRONG, and Italic tags important for SEO?

There’s no official confirmation that Google uses these tags as ranking factors.
Therefore there’s been a lot of speculations on this subject: some SEOs will advise you to use bold, others will tell you not to bother with it.

The truth is that we could only GUESS if bold and italic have any effect on page rankings or not.

In their most recent study on the search engine rankings factors, MOZ.com asked 120 leading search marketers to rate how important they think that the use of bold and italic on keywords was. Their answer was 2.8 out of 10 (1 meaning “No importance” to 10 meaning “Very Important).

Therefore, the “keyword present in bold, italic, em tag” didn’t even make it to the final list of the search engine rankings factors for 2013.

This suggests that the correlation between the presence of bolded keywords on a web page and its rankings is even lower than 0.02.
According to the same study, even important on-site SEO elements, such as the usage of keywords in the Title Tags and Meta Descriptions have a positive correlation of only 0.10 – 0.13.

And Search Metrics’ annual ranking factors study doesn’t even analyze the usage of bold and italic.

For some reason, however, SEOmoz’ On-Page Grader is looking at the presence B and STRONG tags when grading how well a web page is optimized:

The same stands for Yoorank and many more web applications which analyze on-site SEO elements.

Why you should still use bold and italic on your website

In my opinion, even IF the use of bold and italic within pages has any impact on rankings, it is so minute, that it’s better to spend your time on other things.

But this doesn’t mean that you should completely neglect the usage of these HTML elements.

Think of your users and about the way they consume your content. Normally visitors “scan” your content. So you should use bold and italic tags to style your content in order to make it easier to read and consume by your users. This improves their user experience and they will easily engage with your content.

Best practices for the usage of bold and italic tags

If I’m asked if there’s an official best practice for the use of bold and italic, I would refer to official HTML standards.

According to the official HTML 5 specification:

• headings should be denoted with the <h1> to <h6> tags,
• emphasized text should be denoted with the <em> tag,
• important text should be denoted with the <strong> tag, and
• marked/highlighted text should use the <mark> tag.

The HTML 5 specification states that:

• The <b> and <i> tag should be used as a LAST resort when no other tag is more appropriate.
• The <i> tag can be used to indicate a technical term, a phrase from another language, a thought, or a ship name, etc.
• The <b> tag can be used to bold text on the page, but it’s recommended to use the CSS “font-weight” property to set bold text.

For more information on the optional and standard attributes of a B tag, you could check the HTML <b> tag page on the w3cschool website and the W3 page on font style elements.

People tend to scan webpages instead of reading every word. Bolding keywords and key phrases may not have an impact on your page rankings but it will definitely help the readability and consumption of your content. By styling the most relevant phrases and keywords with bold and italic tags, you are helping the user to understand your content faster, which will provide a better user experience and even reduce page bounce rate.

What are meta tags in Blogger, and how do you create them?

If you run a Blogger blog for your business or organization, you may occasionally need to alter the HTML code for it. In general, Blogger automates the coding aspects of your blog, saving you significant amounts of time creating HTML and CSS code. However, if you want to include meta tags within your blog, you do need to edit its HTML code. Adding meta tags to your blog allows you to include information that may affect how well it performs in search engines.

1. Create a blank text file in a text editor to build your meta tags. Rather than writing the code directly into Blogger, it is easier to prepare it in advance. The most common meta tags are for the site keywords and description. You can also include meta elements to indicate the author and revised dates for page content. To create a keywords meta element, use the following outline:

This example could be for a print and design business, with the keywords indicating the content of the site pages. Alter the keywords to suit the content on your own blog. For the description meta element, use the following syntax:

The description includes readable sentences concisely explaining the content and purpose of the site. Again, alter this to suit your own blog.

2. Access the HTML content for your blog. Log in to Blogger and find your blog in the Dashboard. If you are using the newer Blogger interface, select "Template" from the drop-down list for your blog. For the older style, click "Design" for the blog you are working on. Click "Edit HTML" from the list along the top of the Design section. A large text field appears with your blog code in it. Check the "Expand Widget Templates" check box above the text field to show all of the code for the template your blog is using.

3. Find the head section of your blog. You need to place your meta tags in the head section of your blog template. The easiest way to do this is to locate the closing tag. You can use your browser's "find" tool to do this by pressing "Ctrl-F" or choosing "Edit" and then "Find" from the browser toolbar menu. Enter "" (without quotes) and press "Enter" to find it in the HTML code. Place your cursor before the closing head tag.

4. Enter your meta tags. Copy your meta tags from the text file you created by selecting the code and pressing "Ctrl-C" or "Edit" and then "Copy" from the menu in your text editor. Go to the point you placed your cursor at in the Blogger HTML code and paste the meta tags by pressing "Ctrl-V" or choosing "Edit" and then "Paste" from your browser menu. Click the "Save Template" button under the HTML text field for your blog. Your blog template will be updated to include the meta tags.

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Top 46 SEO Interview Questions & Answers

 Following are frequently asked SEO Job Interview Questions for freshers as well as experienced Digital marketing professionals.

1) What is SEO?  What are the important types of SEO methods?

Search engine optimization or SEO is a process of keep changing the position of a web page or website in a search engine results by using keywords or phrases.

Two Types of SEO are:

1. On Page Optimization
2. Off Page Optimization

2) What are the SEO tools do you use?

The SEO tools that I use are Google analytic, Keyword Planner, Alexa, open site explorer, Google Webmaster.

3) What do you mean by Backlink?

The incoming links to your website or webpage are referred to as Backlink. It is also called as an inbound link.

4) What are outbound Links?

The outbound links are Links, from your website to another webpage or website.

5) Explain Googlebot

To index and update a webpage Google uses the Googlebot (Web Spider). Caching, Crawling and indexing of a webpage are done through Googlebot by collecting details from that webpage.

6) What is Cross-linking?  What is the function of Crosslinking?

1. Cross-linking is the process of linking one site to another site.
2. It provides users with reference sites that contain the content related to the search.
3. The 2 websites cross-linking do not be owned by the same person.
4. In other words, cross-linking is a barter wherein I link to you, and you link to me.
5. It could be a 2-way link or 3-way link. In a 2-way link site A links to site B and site B links to site A. In a 3-way link, site A links to site B, site B links to site C and site C links to site A.

7) What is the main purpose of using keyword in SEO?

A keyword is a single word, and while a combination of those keywords makes phrases. These keywords or phrases are used by the search engines to populate the subjects over the internet. Search engine stores keywords in the database, and when a search is done, it will come up with the best possible match.

8)  Explain body content relevance

Whenever there is a text that does not have images on the web page is referred to as body content relevance or non-image text. It helps in good optimization of the sites and also to improve your ranking in the search engine.

9) Explain Spiders, Robots, and Crawlers

Spiders, robot and crawler, they are all the same and referred by different names. It is a software program that follows or “Crawls” various links throughout the internet, and then grabs the content from the sites and adds to the search engine indexes.

10) What does it mean if nothing appears while searching for the domain?

On searching for your domain and if nothing appears, then there are three possibilities.

1. Maybe the site is banned by search engines
2. Maybe no index by search engines
3. Some canonical issues

11)What is keyword stemming?

The process of finding out new keywords from the root keyword from the search query is referred to as keywords stemming. Adding a prefix, suffix, or pluralization can be used to create the new keyword.

12) Name some SEO blogs that help you to enhance your content marketing strategies

1. Google Webmaster Central
2. Search Engine Land
3. SEOSmarty
4. MOZ
5. Search Engine Journal
6. BacklinkO

13) What do you mean by Cloaking?

Cloaking is a deceptive way of optimizing your website for search. In this technique, different content will be shown to the search engine crawler than what is presented to the end users.

14) How many types of Meta Tags are there in SEO?  What are their characters limits?

There are mainly for types of Meta tags in SEO.

1. Meta Description tag with 1200 pixels limits
2. Meta Keyword tag
3. Title Tag with 600 pixels limits
4. Meta Robots

15) How many characters limits in & Meta Description tag?

We can add 70 characters in a title tag and 222 characters in the Meta Description tag. Though Google now places a pixel limit.

16) What is Google Sandbox?

Google sandbox is an imaginary area where new websites and their search rating are put on hold until they prove worthy for ranking. In other words, it checks the standard of the website.

17) What is Black Hat SEO

In order to get a high ranking in SEO search engine result page, websites go for various methods and techniques which are characterized by two categories. One method that is acceptable by search engine guidelines is known as White Hat SEO, while the other method which is not acceptable by search engine guidelines is known as Black Hat SEO.

18) What are some famous Black Hat SEO techniques?

1. Link Farming
2. Hidden text, etc.
3. Gateway or Doorway pages
4. Cloaking
5. Keyword Stuffing

19) State the difference between ‘nofollow’ and ‘dofollow’ link

Nofollow links do not pass Link juice and have no impact on Google Ranking Algorithm. Dofollow link passes link juice and has an impact on Google Ranking Algorithm.

20) What is the difference between PR (page rank) and SERP (Search engine result page)

Page rank is calculated on the basis of quality inbound links from other website or webpages to our webpage or a website.

SERP (Search Engine Result page) is the placement of the website or web-pages which is returned by the search engine after a search query or attribute.

21) Why is Title Tag on Website valuable?

Title tags are essential in SEO, as it tells about the contents on that web page. Through title tags only the search engine will notify the user, what is there in the page.

22) What is considered as more significant, creating content or building backlinks?

Both are necessary for creating quality content is equally important to building backlinks. Although link building is useful in building authority to a site and for ranking as well, quality content is the first element that is considered to be more responsible for ranking.

23) What are the differences between SEO and SEM?

SEM (Search Engine Marketing), it is used for the promotion of website through paid advertising by increasing their visibility in Search Engine Result Page (SERP) in the Ads section.  While SEO is optimizing the site to increase the organic ranking of a site.

24) Explain the term LSI

LSI stands for Latent Semantic Indexing. This technique is established to obtain the data by relating the word to its closest counterparts or its similar context. For example, if you are searching for something with a keyword “CAR” it will show all the related things like classic cars, car auctions, Bentley car, car race, etc.

25) How will you cross-check whether your SEO campaign is working or not?

In order to check whether your SEO campaign is working or not, the first approach is to check the website’s statistics, which tells you about the origin of the traffic.  The other way of checking is to make a search based on the relevant keywords and key phrases and look for the search result. The number of search result will tell you whether your SEO campaign is working or not.

26) What is the meaning of competitive analysis?

Competitive analysis does the comparison, between the website I am optimizing, and the website that is ranked highly in search results.

27) What will be your next steps if your SEO methods or technique does not work?

My first attempt would to try analysis the problem and resolve them step by step

1. Firstly I would try to see whether it is a new project, and then like to re-check the keywords.
2. Also, I would look for relevant keywords that can be helpful.
3. Even though the webpage and website have been indexed well and still not appearing on the first 10 pages of search engine result page, then I would make some changes in page text, titles, and description.
4. If the website is not indexed well or dropped from the index, then it might comprise serious issues, and re-work might be required.

28) What is PPC?

PPC stands for Pay Per Click and is an advertisement campaign hosted by Google.  It is segmented into two modules CPC ( Cost per click) and CPM ( Cost per thousand impressions) through flat rate and bidding respectively. In CPC, if the user clicks on the advert, only then the advertiser will be charged.

29) What is 301 redirect?

It is a method by which the user is redirected to new page url to old page url. It is a permanent redirect, and it is also useful in directing link juice to new url from old url.

30) What are Webmaster tools?

Webmaster tool is a service provided by Google from where you can get backlink information, crawl errors, search queries, Indexing data, CTR, etc.

31) What is keyword density and what is the formula for knowing keyword density?

From an SEO point of view, keyword density will definitely help to stand out your content from others. The formula to know the keyword density is ( Total number of keyword/ total number of words in your article) multiply by 100.

32) What is robots.txt? 

Robots.txt is a text file. It is through this file. It gives instruction to search engine crawlers about indexing and caching of a webpage, file of a website or directory, domain.

33) What will you do, for the company website you are working for, decides to move all the contents to a new domain?

The first step would be to update the previous site with a permanent redirect to a new page for all the pages. After that, I will remove the previous content from the search engine in order to avoid duplicate content issues.

34)How can you optimize the website which has millions of pages?

From an SEO point of view, for dynamic website, special additional SEO stuff has to be implemented.

1. Good Internal link structure
2. Generation of dynamic title and description
3. Dynamic XML sitemap generation

35) What is the latest update in SEO?

The latest updates in SEO are:

1. Panda
2. Penguin

36) What are the key aspects of the Panda update?

Panda is to improve the search on Google. The latest version has focused on quality content, proper design, proper speed, proper use of images and many more.

37) What are the key aspects of Penguin update?

Penguin is the code name for Google algorithm. Its main target is to decrease the ranking of that website that are violating the Google Webmaster guidelines. These guidelines are violated by using black hat techniques like Cloaking and stuffing.

38) How will you neutralize a toxic link to your site?

Through Backlink Quality Checker you can know who links to your website. Now, you have to go to ‘Toxic link’ report, where you will find all the links, that are harmful to your websites. If there is any link in ‘Toxic link report’ that matches with the link on your website, then you can remove it by using ‘Google Disavov tool’.

39) How can you check if someone is not building or redirecting a low-quality backlink to your site?

To prevent someone from building or redirecting a low-quality link to your site, you can use tools like,

• Ahrefs
• Open Site Explorer

On regular intervals. You can either request the webmaster to remove the bad link or disavow them.

40) How do backlink tools work?

Backlink tools run a series of tests to tell you how many backlinks are pointing to the web link you entered.  Additional information is also being collected like anchor text used, Domain Authority & Trust of the backlink source, and any potential flags or warnings for each link.

41) How often should you perform a link audit?

A link audit may be a tedious and complicated process.  If you have just started on building links, you can do an audit quite often.  But a complete link audit should be done approximately once a year.

42) What do you understand by Frames in HTML?

A-Frame in HTML is a technique that divides the content of a page onto several parts.  Search engines consider Frames as completely different pages and may have a negative impact on SEO. We should avoid the usage of Frames and use basic HTML instead.

43) Which is the most important area to include your keywords?

The most important area to include your keywords are,

• Page title
• Body text
• Meta Description

44) What will you do if the search engines ban your website for black hat practices?

If the search engines ban your website for black hat practices, you can apply for re-inclusion after correcting your wrongdoings.

45) What will be your approach if your SEO method doesn’t work?

If the SEO method doesn’t work then do the  following,

• First, see whether it is a new project then re-check the keywords
• Then look for relevant keywords that can be helpful
• Make changes in page text, title, and description
• If still not ranked then there may be some other serious issues like bad links, penguin/panda or other Google penalty, crawlability issues, UI issue, etc.

46) What are the social media platform used for SEO ?

Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn are some important platform which is used for online promotion.

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