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SEO and Underlining the Keyword

by xento
6 replies
  • SEO
    • |
Most SEO optimizing plugins suggest that you bold, italicize, and underline your keyword. Bolding can use the html markup tag <strong> while italic can use the tag <em> but underlining, which used to be done using the <u> tag is now deprecated and underlining should now be done through css as a best practice.

Old way:
Code:
<u>my keyword</u>
New way:
Code:
<span style="text-decoration: underline;">my keyword</span>
Does google read your css code like that? Do you think underlining the keyword is really that important nowadays or is it just a remnant practice of the old <u> tag?
#keyword #seo #underlining
  • Profile picture of the author Lucas Becker
    Originally Posted by xento View Post

    Most SEO optimizing plugins suggest that you bold, italicize, and underline your keyword. Bolding can use the html markup tag <strong> while italic can use the tag <em> but underlining, which used to be done using the <u> tag is now deprecated and underlining should now be done through css as a best practice.

    Old way:
    Code:
    <u>my keyword</u>
    New way:
    Code:
    <span style="text-decoration: underline;">my keyword</span>
    Does google read your css code like that? Do you think underlining the keyword is really that important nowadays or is it just a remnant practice of the old <u> tag?
    It doesn't matter which method you use, both work well for SEO purposes. However, Google doesn't give that much weight to bolded keywords as it used to. Also, don't over-do bolding, italicizing and underlining, it could get assessed as keyword stuffing.
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  • Profile picture of the author ashleysmith12
    Hi.
    It doesn't matter if you use your keyword with bold, italic or underline, the main thing is that your keyword must be relevant to your website.
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    • Profile picture of the author BackLinkiT
      ...takes me back to the good old days!
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      • Profile picture of the author chippy361
        I had a steady page 1 position 2 ranking for one keyword phrase and a page 2 position 2 ranking for another keyword phrase (different product pages)
        I had read about highlighting keywords and followed a suggestion that the phrase for which I was ranking should be highlighted strong, italic and underlined.
        I did this and when Google next crawled the site, my page 1 position 2 slipped to page 3 and my page 2 position 2 slipped out of this world to page 300 odd.
        No other linking or SEO work was done to these pages.
        As a test I have now highlighted a different keyphrase on a page I am ranking on page 1 for to see if this also suffers a drop and I have removed the highlighting altogether on the other pages to see if they return to their high positions when next crawled. I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on this
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  • Profile picture of the author steven Clayden
    Well, i put up a site yesterday 5 pages and 2 posts. Homepage had bold,underlined and italiced keywords. Currently sat number 1 on google.Keyword density around 1.8%

    Domain is EMD.
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    • Profile picture of the author TerryL
      I did an experiment with a few of my sites to see if using the H1, H2, and H3 tags in each article helped. I always bold, italicize, and underline my keyword once each per article. I did this on all the sites in my experiment. All the articles had the bold, italicized, and underlined keyword. But some sites also used the keyword once each per article in H1, H2, and H3 tags.

      The sites all also had a 1.5% to 2% keyword density and each post had an image with the keyword as the alt tag (as well as a fully filled out All in One SEO plugin on each article).

      The results were that the sites WITHOUT the keywords in the H tags ranked better and more quickly than the ones with it. So I can't say if the underline makes a difference, but all of my sites used the underlined keyword. The only difference was whether or not I was using the H tags, too, which DID seem to make a difference in the rankings.

      Maybe next time, I'll test sites using the underline and not using it. It would be interesting to see what the results of that were.
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