SEO Hack - underline and bold keywords and key phrases!

Lynne Level 1

November 7, 2016, 11:24 am

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SEO Hack - underline and bold keywords and key phrases!

When I first started working online I was told to put my keywords into headings and I did this but I also found it quite tricky to write my content naturally and include all relevant keywords in headings and make that flow really nicely.

A few months back I came across a really cool article that shared some seo hacks and they mentioned that underlining keywords and key phrases and/ or putting keywords and key phrases in bold would tell the search engines that these are relevant, thereby boosting the SEO of those specific keywords.

I have been implementing this in my content the last few months and it has made writing naturally so much easier and I have seen an increase in my rankings... so give this a go and see what happens for you!

Have you tried this and has it worked for you? What is your opinion on underlining keywords?

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idealmike

Oh yes this is a well known on-page SEO hack amongst SEO's and anyone that's been blogging or doing any affiliate marketing of any kind for a long time now. Well not that long only within around the past 5 years or so. Before that people would bold and underline stuff for people only. But since they learned that words that are bolded or underlined have more emphasis put on them by Search Engines, people have been bolding and underlining the main keywords they are targeting.

And in fact, so much so, that anyone with an old blog that has a lot of content on it that isn't ranking as high as you'd like it to. You may just be able to do that and see an increase in rankings by just going through your old content and literally bolding and underlining a few of the main keywords within that content. And it only takes a couple minutes. Unless you have hundreds of articles but then it's definitely worth doing.

Besides, having bold or underlined words in your content, makes it easier for people to read. People use them as references or anchor points when reading so they know where abouts they are within that content. Say if they have to take their eyes away for a second and then carry on reading again. Having words that are bold or even words that are underlined, or words that are bolded and underlined, makes it easier for them to continue where they was reading from.

SEO Hack - underline and bold keywords and key phrases!

So yeah, it should be done and it's good practice for all your subsequent writings. Plain articles that aren't split into bite sized chunks, that are all bunched together with no formatting at all, aren't as engaging and as easy to read as articles that are. That's just article writing 101.

9 years ago

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Lynne

Hey Mike, yes I was previously hardly underlining or bolding anything. I only used these for emphasizing things for my readers but as I go along on my blogging journey I learn more and more.

It is so much easier to make use of this technique than trying to add H2 tags all the time with keywords in! It is so nice to be able to mix it up a little and make use of different techniques throughout my posts.

9 years ago

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anwebservices

I only used these for emphasizing things for my readers

That's why Google love to emphasize their search results too

because many bloggers were doing same thing as you, so Google crawlers picking up these things for SERP purposes. It's easy to understand. Now it becomes one of main thing everyone shoud do while taking care of onpage SEO

9 years ago

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Lynne

Thanks - yeah I guess that may be why it became such a ranking factor. Google is trying to focus on its readers too!

9 years ago

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Cristian

This is a really old trick that Google doesn't put so much weight on as it used to in my opinion. If you bold ONLY your keyword it will become pretty obvious you don't really want to make a statement or make your readers focus on an important statement in exchange Google might see this as a way of hacking the system.

Bolding stuff is good, but from an readability point of view, most user just "scan" articles, you need to make sure you have certain "hooks" in place to catch them before they bounce, and those hooks can easily be implemented with bolding certain words or statements, not necessarily keywords.

9 years ago

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hitmeasap

I often use bold, italic and underline in my content but I don't do it for my keywords intentionally. Instead I've used bold and underline to make certain words and sentences "stand out" a bit from the text, and to give more "power" to them so to speak. - I've been doing this for years and if I remember correctly I believe I started to do this when I worked as a salesperson for Dagens Nyheter, which is a newspaper here in Sweden. I used the same technique when I worked on VIASAT as a salesperson too.

9 years ago

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Corzhens

You mentioned writing contents naturally and I agree that writing in a natural way is the most comfortable for me. But maybe for purposes of SEO capability of the web page, the changing of the font of the keywords to bold and underlined is a good way of increasing the effect of the SEO of the web page. However we will always go back to that line of writing naturally which means I will tend to forget the bold and underline for the keywords in a matter of time unless someone would remind me about it from time to time.

7 years ago

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SEOClerks

SEO Hack - underline and bold keywords and key phrases!

SEO Hack - underline and bold keywords and key phrases!

Comments

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idealmike

Lynne

anwebservices

Lynne

Cristian

hitmeasap

Corzhens

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