Is it still neccessary to write keywords in bold type?

There are soooo many other factors that go into SEO ... bolding, methinks, is 'way down there.

That being said, adding the strong attribute without being trigger happy could certainly help a wee bit.

You'll find that years ago, back in 2006, Matt Cutts mentioned that bolding or stronging keywords does help. 'Course, that was back then over at SEO Answers on Google Video .


http://seoforums.org/seo-questions-a...-bold-why.html

talks about it more.

The authority site:

Perfecting Keyword Targeting & On-Page Optimization for SEO | SEOmoz

also mentioned that:

"Bold/Strong - Using a keyword in bold/strong appears to carry a very, very tiny amount of SEO weight, and thus it's suggested as a best practice to use the targeted term/phrase at least once in bold, though a very minor one.".....

Hope that helps!

Agreed bolding is one of many but yes it helps

Ummm.....It never was

That was working few years back, but it doesn't work now IMO. I don't use that tactics nowadays as it's not working for me anymore. I don't see differences with contents that have bold, underlined and italic keywords. Just focus on high quality contents and backlinks and it'll give you great results.

While bolding a couple keywords won't drastically improve your rankings serp wise, it's still considered a good on-page seo practice that includes other things like header/ description tags, LSI keywords, internal page links, etc.

For me, it doesn't really matter. What is more important is you are using relevant keywords and create good backlinks. The article must be of high quality and must be submitted to high authority sites. The target market should find these articles too worthy to read.

Well, here's the gist of why bolding helps...It all comes down to relevancy:

When Google spiders a webpage, the way that they determine if and what it should rank for it is by looking at the text on the page…The search engine bot analyzes every single word looking for themes and key phrases that it can help algorithmically assign meaning too.

This is why we used to keyword stuff articles - Because Google used to automatically assume (and rightly so, from a logical stand point - Those dang SEOs!) that the more times a given keyword appeared, the more relevant the page in question was to that given keyword, thus it became much more likely to rank in the SERPs for it.

So to digress, Google assumes (often rightly, SEOs excluded) that when a webmaster actually takes the time to bold a keyword that it must be extra important...Just like they do to a greater extent with <header> tags and <title> tags.

If you're worried about looking like a spammer to Google, then instead of bolding the exact keyword that you're targeting, bold a keyword variation instead. This does basically the same thing in effect, but looks a lot better to a manual reviewer, and possibly to Google's constantly-fighting-any-and-all-seo algorithm.

Hope that helps!

- Stephen

Yes, it helps.

^ co-sign