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Some webmasters claim putting your keywords in bold or putting your keywords in italics is a beneficial ranking factor in terms of search engine optimising a page.
It is essentially impossible to test this, and I think these days, Google could well be using this (and other easy to identify on page optimisation efforts) to determine what to punish a site for, not promote it in SERPs.
Any item you can ‘optimise’ on your page – Google can use this against you to filter you out of results.
I use bold or italics these days specifically for users.
I only use emphasis if it’s natural or this is really what I want to emphasise!
Do not tell Google what to filter you for that easily.
I think Google treats websites they trust far different to others in some respect.
That is, more trusted sites might get treated differently than untrusted sites.
Keep it simple, natural, useful and random.
I get asked this all the time –
how much text do you put on a page to rank for a certain keyword?
The answer is there is no optimal amount of text per page, but how much text you’ll ‘need’ will be based on your DOMAIN AUTHORITY, your TOPICAL RELEVANCE and how much COMPETITION there is for that term and HOW COMPETITIVE that competition is. Instead of thinking about the quantity of the text, you should think more about the quality of the content on the page. Optimise this with searcher intent in mind. Well, that’s how I do it.
I don’t find that you need a minimum amount of words or text to rank in Google. I have seen pages with 50 words outrank pages with 100, 250, 500 or 1000 words. Then again I have seen pages with no text rank on nothing but inbound links or other ‘strategy’. In 2016, Google is a lot better at hiding away those pages, though.
At the moment, I prefer long form pages with a lot of text although I still rely heavily on keyword analysis to make my pages. The benefits of longer pages are that they are great for long tail key phrases. Creating deep, information rich pages focuses the mind when it comes to producing authoritative, useful content.
Every site is different. Some pages, for example, can get away with 50 words because of a good link profile and the domain it is hosted on. For me, the important thing is to make a page relevant to a user’s search query. I don’t care how many words I achieve this with and often I need to experiment on a site I am unfamiliar with. After a while, you get an idea how much text you need to use to get a page on a certain domain into Google.
One thing to note – the more text you add to the page, as long as it is unique, keyword rich and relevant, the more that page will be rewarded with more visitors from Google. There is no optimal number of words on a page for placement in Google. Every website – every page – is different from what I can see. Don’t worry too much about word count if your content is original and informative. Google will probably reward you on some level – at some point – if there is lots of unique text on all your pages.
Chuck Reynolds
Contributor
