When reading blogs I notice that quite often within the paragrapgh text there will be words highlighted using bold.  I was wondering if there a reason behind it and can anyone shed any light on it for me?  It could also be that they just want to extra emphasis on what they are saying- the trouble is that it sometimes feels as if they are shouting at the reader.Thanks in advance,Hazel

@hazelmclellan This is helpful advice too from the post, Format your posts for readability, where Michael Martin suggests, 

“…the best usage of bold formatting is when you can highlight a phrase which sums up the whole paragraph. If you removed all but the words in bold on this page, you would end up with a usable summary of the page.”

I think it helps to remember that blog readers often skim.  Being able to pick out key words and phrases quickly can be helpful in deciding whether or not we’re going to need the information in that particular blog.

Thanks everyone  @jgassistance @lisapietsch @kristi-hines @debbie-hemley @blogsbyheather  for good advice and  information. Fantastic to be able to pose a question that has been niggling me for ages but not sure where I could ask for informed answers.  Huge thank yous and a happy New Year !

Heh, my english teacher told us that the use of bold, italics or underlining pointed to poor writing skills (excepting of course needs for citation or ships names etc). That if you are writing correctly that is unnecessary. If you want to sum up a post or something, state so. But bold to me draws attention away from the rest of the post, which is what I want them to read. For H1 or maybe H2 tags I get it. Otherwise, avoid the bold!

@glengorham There are a lot of elements that are great for online content that would be shunned by textbook teaching.  I think the issue with online content is that you are supposed to assume that most visitors are just skimming the content.  Hence, you want to use bold or italics in the text (along with header tags) to get people’s attention.  I know I’m a skimmer because I go through a lot of articles a day in my RSS reader, and sometimes it will be a bold sentence in the middle of a paragraph that draws me into reading more vs. moving on to something else.

This is an interesting answer on the topic of bold text.

http://www.seomoz.org/q/does-it-still-help-to-bold-text-on-webpages-to-draw-the-attention-of-the-search-engine-bots

Particularly the part on conversions…

“I have found this to be quite effective in improving conversions on client sites. One site in particular went from a conversion rate of 2.2% to a conversion rate of 26% after making only this change.”

@kristi-hines Great article – thanks for sharing Kristi!!

@hazelmclellan Just don’t put too much of your text in bold; it really irritates your readers!

(Yes, I did that intentionally so you can see how too much bolding is not a good thing.)

Just thought I would throw this in as a part of the discussion.

http://www.contentmarketinginstitute.com/2012/01/new-breed-content-marketing-engineer/

Too much bold?  :)

I think, for SEO purposes, it’s better to put the emphasized text in <h> brackets. Better than using bold. Set up the <h3></h3> tag to look like bolded text. Does anyone else think this is a better approach for emphasis?

This thread really hits on a lot of great points so I’d like to add some reasoning and use of bold, Strictly for the sake of SEO here.

When it comes to breaking up your articles I do not see the point in bolding entire sections that is just going to confuse the search engines… From a “readers” perspective this may work better for you if you want a “user” experience.

but when writing your articles….

  use bold in your Keywords
    – *not every time you write your keyword lol… but definitely at least once or twice throughout your article.

Google recognizes bold, underline, italicized, links in your article (that report back to your article or blog) and then “H” tags.  Use all of these simple recognition tools throughout your article, and give Google some help by Keywording what your article is about. 

Proper Keyword Density:   count the number of words in your article. Multiply that by .025   This should be the number of times your keyword should be written throughout your article.  if you go over 3% you may end up keyword stuffing and below 2% may not be enough for Google to recognize.

In conclusion no matter what the use of bold, SEO, or reader experience, definitely an important factor in my business.

Nice Thread
@hazelmclellan @debbie-hemley @tojosan @glengorham @laurachristianson @karenolenick

@hazelmclellan, just imagine, you’re reading a news paper or a magazine, what will attract your eyes first? normal text or the bigger size/highlighted and bold text? Same is the case with the eyes of robots(search engines). Google Robot and other robots of other search engine notify highlighted text first while crawling/visiting your website, that’s why this is used in SEO…:)