Keywords that are bold in text

[ReSEOlve]

Hi, Does anyone think having keywords in your articles that are bold or i_talic_ or underlined makes any difference ?

[ClaytonJ]

Size can matter in a H1 - i have seen some minor effects there.

However if you are asking for general usage in articles/editorial - then no it does not matter is the answer, from an seo perspective.

[EGOL]

Small on-page changes have the greatest opportunity to be helpful when you compete for a keyword with very little competition.  However, as the level of competition increases other factors become so much more important that tweaking text adornments becomes meaningless.  This is logical because in very competitive SERPs, searchers are more concerned with content quality, reputation of the company, and other factors of visitor satisfaction, than what's in italics on the page.

I don't go through my pages bolding my keywords because I think that it looks distracting to the visitor.  However, I do bold in-content link text to call attention to it.  Doing that lets the visitor know that I have more information about those topics on other pages of my website.  It does lift visitor engagement with those links.  That increases my ad revenue and may lift my rankings because of the deeper visitor engagement.

One of my employees thinks that it looks "cartoony" and I kind of agree, but I still like the look because I am proud of the content that the visitor will find after clicking the links.