Fonts and SEO: how to use bold and cursive in the right way

It is quite an old topic, been talked about for over ten years now, but it still happens sometimes that some user asks us: “Is there any difference in the use of the strong and bold HTML tags? And what about between italic and emphasized? How much the use of these font signals can impact on SEO?”. Here is some indications that we hope can clarify the question and reassure both SEO copywriters and editors.

The use of emphasized fonts could influence SEO

Let’s immediately clear the field: there could be a mild value for SEO in using the new strong and emphasized tags, and there surely is a value in terms of usability and readability for people, that with a single glance can detect the part of the text we decided to highlight.

Quickly going back on these tags’ history will allow us to figure out the reason of this claim.

Which ones are the old HTML tags

Since the first absolute steps of HTML code there were some tags useful to give a different text appearance into the browsers display: <b> was the label for bold, <i> the one for italic and <u> was the one for the underline.

More specifically, the <b> bold tag indicates a stylistic and graphic difference of one or multiple words compared to the rest of the text, without though attaching specific signals of importance to these parts.

The <i> italic tag represents a portion of the text in which we would like to express something (like a tone or a mood, for instance) which deviates from the rest of the content, without the adding of other meanings or elements of importance.

The <u> underline tag is instead used to highlight portions of texts and distinguish them from what is near.

On all three cases, we are talking about notes merely valuable from a graphic perspective, that never added particular info on the highlighted words to crawlers.

The strong ed em HTML tags: a semantic value

With the creation of HTML5 and the spreading of the semantic web the b and i tags were definitely deprecated and replaced by new labels: “strong” and “em”. Not only a formal modification, but rather a substantial one: these indications have now a stronger expressive ability and communicate a well-defined meaning, that can be interpreted by search engine crawlers.

What does bold with strong mean

To label one or more terms with the strong tag means to attribute a clear relevance to this text: it is useful to theme the page, can be also used inside headings and could even help to lay emphasis on the keywords we are aiming to with our SEO strategy. It is not a matter of simple visual highlight anymore, but a true and proper signal even search engines are sensitive to, now interpreting that text as semantically important.

What does cursive with em mean

Similar is the meaning of the new <em> tag, useful to emphasize (like the name of the label itself says, indeed, emphasis) a text or a sentence that have a different tone from the rest. On