Keyword emphasis is the process used to highlight keywords within a webpage. Keyword emphasis is designed to make a keyword apparent to the end user by highlighting it in bold.
The SEO benefits of keyword emphasis are minimal, however, they do help.
Using keyword emphasis is easy, and can be quickly implemented by using a BOLD tag or by a STRONG tag, both tags perform the same function.
You may have already seen pages on the internet where certain words appear in bold, i.e.
"Our website offers a complete range of makeup products including maybelliene and gucci"
If the keywords for that page are the brands, then they would appear like this using emphasis:
"Our website offers a complete range of makeup products including maybelliene and gucci"
The reason for keyword emphasis was initially to make keywords or pieces of content on the page stand out, for relevancy reasons. If a word is highlighted, it is more likely to attract the visitors' attention. Over the years, the emphasis element was used as a ranking factor in search engine optimization although this value has decreased.
Keyword emphasis can still be beneficial towards SEO providing keywords and relevant keywords are highlighted in moderation. It is not just keywords that should be highlighted but also keywords that are relative to the pages core keywords. This is because search engines look at the way a website conveys relevancy on a page by page basis and on an entire website basis.
Implementing keyword emphasis is easy, it can be done using either of the following tags,
<B> KEYWORDS HERE </B>
<STRONG> KEYWORDS HERE </STRONG>
When highlighting keywords on a page, it is important that it is not done excessively.
Here are some tips:
" Do not use too much keyword emphasis on each page, no more than 10 keywords should be highlighted
" Focus emphasis on one group of keywords
" Only emphasis keywords that are relative
" Do not emphasis links or entire sentences
For more information you can learn about keyword emphasis by visiting
http://www.assertive-media.co.uk/keyword-emphasis.html
