Does bold or italic improve your ranking?
Among the favorite methods of some SEO professionals, we find the bold or italicization of some parts of the text containing interesting keywords.
Before we tell you how search engines feel about this kind of process, let's get back to basics! Which means, let's get back to HTML.
The following four tags are often used: on one side we have "b / strong" and on the other side "em / i".
On most modern browsers, the use of "b" and "strong" leads tagged texts to be displayed in bold while "em" and "i" leads to an italicized display.
You must know that regarding "em" and "strong", the results depend on a completely arbitrary choice of browsers (Chrome , Firefox, Edge...).
Only <i> (for italic) and <b> (for bold) explicitly require a specific graphics rendering.
<em> requires an emphasis while <strong> requires an even more important emphasis.
Consequently, if your goal is strictly visual, it is better to use <i> and <b> (and it is even more recommended to focus on CSS styles).
As for a semantic markup, we prefer to use <strong> and <em>, certainly like search engines.
However, even if the bonus we get is hard to quantify, we can say that it is probably quite low. Nevertheless, the emphasis on your bold contents can have a visual impact on the Internet user. But be careful! Too much bold kills bold.
