Keyword Emphasis | Keyword Highlighting for SEO, Highlighting Keywords in Strong Tags

Keyword emphasis is a means of highlighting text within a page. Keyword emphasis can be utilised in a number of different ways for a number of different reasons. Typically, website emphasis was a part of the initial HTML coding standards. Even to this day, keyword emphasis and content emphasis remain incredibly popular, moreso for the end user rather than just search engines.

When emphasising a keyword, it becomes a highlighted object within the page designed to stand out to the end user. Keywords and content can be highlighted to make sure it is seen as a prominent part of the page, wether it is content related or image related.

Using content and keyword emphasis, you can highlight single keywords or multiple words in a sentence. More often than not this system is over used or not utilised properly. When highlighting information, it should be so that the end user can understand the information to be important. Search engines can detect when this tag is overused, or when it is used out of content, perhaps to highlight information that has no relevance to the page, i.e. CLICK HERE or MORE INFORMATION.

Within content, highlighted keywords not only stand out, but it also shows the end user that the highlighted keyword is a point to remember or to understand further. References are also highlighted in content emphasis tags.

Keyword emphasis is a tag that can have a mixed approach, typically it is designed for highlighting content and not for SEO purposes, it is designed for the highlighting of selective content, but when used effectively can have beneficial effects towards a websites SEO status.

Keyword emphasis is typically integrated using a BOLD tag within HTML. This is represented with a <B> tag and closed with a </B> tag. What ever content is placed between the open and closed bold tag will be highlighted on the page as follows:

No Bold: The World is full of Surprises
Bold: The World is full of Surprises

Another tag that is frequently used is a strong tag which is opened and closed by <STRONG> & </STRONG>. This has the same visual effects as a bold tag, but is a different representation within HTML. The influence is the same as a bold tag.

Bold Tags
The bold tags used within web pages highlight key pieces of information. This should be used on RELEVANT information throughout the web page, for example, a page talking about cars, should highlight not only the keyword cars, but also content relative to it such as Vauxhall, Ford, Renault etc. This shows that the content is broad, and that the highlighting shows the most important pieces of information.

Strong Tags
This is the equivalent to a bold tag and does exactly the same thing. Many argue that the strong tag is recognised by search engine as a better way of representing the information, even though this is known not to be the case. Because the tags have exactly the same effect, they are treated the same way.

Italic and Underlining Tags
This is an alternative method to highlighting keywords, both options can be used. Italic tags allow for content to appear in italic, and underlining can be used to make content appear with an underline running below.

These tags contribute towards SEO efforts on the website, the use of tagging should be utilised for the end user as well as search engines. Search engines look for highlighted information and will evaluate the relativity between the content and the highlighted content.

Using italic and underlining tagging can be beneficial, but also can become detrimental if abused. It is ideal to highlight content only if it needs to be highlighted towards the end user.