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Strong tags - are they really worth using?

by frambles
8 replies
  • SEO
    • |
I am working on some text on my website pages and am experimenting with strong tags as I am told they are a good way to tell search engines that particular text is more important.

My question is, does using a strong tag on a keyphrase hinder the effectiveness of the words within it?

For example, the keyword "explosion sound effects" gets over 18,000 global searches on Google a month. But "free explosion sound effects" gets only 2,900. Does putting "free explosion sound effects" in a strong tag stop just "explosion sound effects" being recognised as a separate keyword?

Or should I leave strong tags alone?

Thanks
#strong #tags #worth
  • Profile picture of the author jack4321
    in my view, you should also look the competition dynamics of this tag maybe
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  • Profile picture of the author sovereignn
    I use the strong tag once per page no more than that

    Never really made a noticeable difference but it's an alright practice
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  • Profile picture of the author John Williamson
    May be a dumb question, but what exactly do you mean by 'strong tags'?

    If you mean header tags (h1, h2, etc.) then yea I say why not? It can't hurt to include your keyword phrase in those if it's relevant to the section headers for your content, provided you don't go overboard and trigger that new over-optimization penalty.
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    • Profile picture of the author tylerherman
      Don't use strong tags for SEO that ship has sailed. You're more than likely going to get a nice penalty from the Googlez for doing stupid on-page keyword garbage.
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    • Profile picture of the author sovereignn
      Originally Posted by John Williamson View Post

      May be a dumb question, but what exactly do you mean by 'strong tags'?

      If you mean header tags (h1, h2, etc.) then yea I say why not? It can't hurt to include your keyword phrase in those if it's relevant to the section headers for your content, provided you don't go overboard and trigger that new over-optimization penalty.
      Strong = bold
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      • Profile picture of the author G minus
        Or really strong = Bold, Italic, Underlined like I have seen recommended by some "SEO Gurus" fairly recently. Never sounded right to me. Think user experience & how odd it would look. It does look spammy I have seen it on websites before.
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    • Profile picture of the author addaminsane
      Originally Posted by John Williamson View Post

      May be a dumb question, but what exactly do you mean by 'strong tags'?

      If you mean header tags (h1, h2, etc.) then yea I say why not? It can't hurt to include your keyword phrase in those if it's relevant to the section headers for your content, provided you don't go overboard and trigger that new over-optimization penalty.
      At this stage in the analysis of the penguin update there is no conclusive evidence of on-page over optimization penalties. Over optimization penalties are strictly tied to link building profiles at this point in time.

      With that said, there is also not much legitimate discussion about the current effectiveness of on page elements such as header tags and strong or bold tags post-pengin. There simply hasn't been enough time and samples to pull data from to draw any sort of conclusion about this right now.

      Unfortunately, the opening question is simply unanswerable (for influencing search results) at this point in my opinion.

      The only way to gain insight into this question is to do your own well structured tests.
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  • Profile picture of the author yellowtaxi
    I would advice to forget to use all these gimmicks and focus more on creating quality content and user experience.
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