Will unstyled bold tags help ranking

[YGF]

I intend using Bold tags to add emphasis but I don't want to
actually show bold words
so have amended by css. are the B tags enough to help with SEO or will my amended
CSS damage the effect? Many thanks,Sinead

[DougRoberts]

I don't think you'll see much, if any, difference putting keywords in bold. I also wouldn't recommend using bold tags (and un-styling them in CSS) just to boost your rankings.

While putting keywords in bold may help search engines understand what your page is about it's such a minor signal that just building one good link may be a better use of your time.

Think about the real people visiting your pages, as well as having good headings to break up content, sensible use of emphasis/bold can help with the "scanability" of the page.

[YannickVeys]

You are cloaking your bold font to show normal font.

I'd suggest not to do it. I don't think SE's actually go that deep by looking at the css and trying to determine if your text is bold to the users as well... But because making words bold is probably in the bottom 2% of what you can do to optimize your page.

So before you get there... You should've done every other thing you could think of

[YGF]

Thanks guys - I am following hubspots "9 Step On-Page Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Guide "

And it has this as part of their step 6, so didn't know that it was only going to be contributing 2% or so towards good ranking. To be honest at this stage I am getting desperate, following guideline after guideline and not getting anywhere, I figure that if I keep working towards best practice it will have to start paying dividends at some stage! Fingers cross - and thanks again for responses

[YannickVeys]

You can only do so much on-page optimisation.

Get the value of your domain and pages up by building links. Make something your audience loves, and you can stop crossing your fingers and just see how people naturally link to your site.

That's way better than putting effort in css to avoid text being shown as bold. Might not be in your job description as technical SEO but why not think of a technical solution to a customers problem...

[DougRoberts]

I agree with Yannick. Once you've created pages following best-practice then it's time to leave them alone and build some links. As Yannick says, this is a lot easier to do if you've got something worth linking to.

Take a look around your niche, how strong is the competition and what are they doing to get their rankings. What content are they offering, are their any gaps you can exploit, if there something you can do that's unique or just better?

You can use Open Site Explorer to look at the backlinks of your competitors. See if you can figure out why they are getting links.

[YGF]

Great advice guys re the links they certainly seem like the holy grail - I am not doing too bad creating them - I've only a small number but have been careful to try and get them from reputable sources.Google webmaster is picking these up as being in place; but alas at this stage hubspot , alexa, OSE, and SEO moz aren't recongnising them. I am hoping they will at somestage though!

thanks,

SInead