How many times should I use the Strong element to highlight a word as important?

Question

I’m studying HTML got the following question:

<h2>Elemento <strong>div</strong></h2>
O elemento <strong>div</strong> também define uma sessão genérica de uma página, ou seja, pode representar qualquer tipo de conteúdo. O elemento <strong>section</strong> difere do elemento <strong>div</strong> pois ele tem uma semantica envolvida, o conteúdo faz sentido estar naquele ponto, no entanto o elemento <strong>div</strong> permite que não tenhamos nenhuma relação com o conteúdo...<br>
É muito usado para fazer formatação de página, para poder alterar o conteúdo com javascript, então <strong>div</strong> é uma sessão sem uma semântica associada.

In the above section:

1. I highlighted the word "div" using the element strong in my title in h2.
2. In the description about the element "div" I highlighted again the same information with the strong again for 3 times.

My question is whether this makes sense to search engines like Google or Bing and whether it impacts on something because I have this number of highlights higher or just the highlight of the word "div" in the title would suffice.

Answer 1

I will leave my consideration. What is Bold <b> and <strong> you can read here What is the semantic difference between <em> and <Strong>? They replace <i> and <b>? and this has much more to do with semantics and accessibility than with SEO. These tags are meant to help screen readers, and while changing the visual appearance of the element, what is at stake is the semantic value of the content, not whether the element appears in bold or not.

As it is already widely discussed no one can know for sure how Google’s Crawler works, this is a million dollar question and whoever finds out is rich. What you can do is testes A/B and check the indexing. A very basic test would be to put your keyword between tag <strong> and see if your rankings improve over the next few days. Don’t make too many changes at once, because you won’t be able to identify what actually increases rankings or not. I suggest you read these articles https://resultadosdigitais.com.br/blog/teste-ab-google-analytics/ and https://rockcontent.com/blog/seo-split-testing/

Another thing, think of the hierarchy of importance of things. When everything seems to be very important, nothing is important, because for the user everything seems to have the same importance... It sounds silly, but a text with too much bold ends up homogenizing and taking the relevance of what is really important, and Google can take this into account.

How do you think Google will classify content treated this way? ;)

These tips for the Keyword perhaps make more sense than filling your text with <strong>s

• Keyword at the Beginning of the title
• Keyword in Meta Description
• The earlier it appears in the text the better (not several times)
• 2-3 different variations of keywords in text
• H1 The exact keyword
• Variation of keywords H2
• In their Urls
• In the anchor text of the internal link
• In the ALT images if you have images

Source: https://webmasters.stackexchange.com/a/118689/83593

Answer 2

This is a controversial and opinion-based theme.

You can’t accurately state how many times you can or can’t use this feature. The fact is that it has its usefulness, and in the present day search engines ranking algorithms are much smarter and exist N variables that together will give a positive or negative final result.

According to the Mozzila the semantics of the tag implies:

The element is used in content that is "of great importance", including urgent things (such as alerts). It may be sentences that are of great importance to the entire page, or, you may merely try to point out that some words are of great importance compared to the next content.

Maybe a test that can work to know if it makes sense, is to replace the values of tags with something like: Heed!. But at the end of the count it’s very subjective to say.

One thing that is already known is that: "Google hates it when it discovers that websites are trying technical tricks instead of doing something that also benefits users..."

This question has a few more references which you can base on and make your own conclusions.

Answer 3

For SEO purposes, the answer is 0.

You should not apply <b>, <strong> or any kind of highlight in any word of text thinking only of SEO.

There are some variables known to be observed by Google to evaluate the relevance of a page, but the amount of times the keyword is bold in the text is certainly irrelevant.

That doesn’t work, and eventually, depending on the situation, I imagine it can even be identified as a ação manual by the seeker.

What works is to be useful to the user, is to provide a good experience. So, to decide when you should highlight the keywords in the text, you should think about the user experience; only about this.

The bold for example should always be used as if it were in an offline text, in order to really highlight a word, phrase or expression that is important within the text.

I think a good tip is to think more broadly, in the text scanning, and use the highlights within the reading focus points in F, which will provide the user to remain more time on the page, and that find what you are looking for easily.

Image of the reading pattern in F:

But note that favoring scanning is not about ranking, but about improving the user reading experience, which will affect several important metrics, such as page stay time, bounce rate...

Think about this: if the user enters your page and leaves quickly - scared with so much bold e.g. rsrs - and goes back to Google to search again for the same keyword that got him to your page, then of course google knows you haven’t solved his problem, and that’s bad.

On the contrary, if he stops searching for the keyword, and remained on his page for a while, it indicates that his page solved his problem, and that’s good. If bold helps in this, cool, otherwise don’t use.

P.S.: A good way to 'know' what Google 'thinks' of your page is to use the https://web.dev, Google tool that serves to evaluate not only SEO, but tbm performance, accessibility and good practices.

Answer 4

The <strong> is a semantic HTML tag that be to give more importance/urgency/seriousness to certain text. You should only actually use it if that text you are tagging is really important to the page user. If you are using <strong> just because you think it would be cool to use it or because you want to mark a few words just to say you’ve marked it... it’s not cool. And it really feels like that’s what you’re doing by often giving importance to the word div without need.

If you want to mark keywords in the document, use the tag <b>, which serves for material purposes without necessarily offering considerable importance to the text, which is ideial for marking the keywords.

<p>
O HTML é uma <b>linguagem de marcação</b> muito antiga e usada para <b>desenvolvimento web</b>. Ela foi inventada por <b>Tim Bernes-Lee</b>.
</p>

The <strong> also defines information hierarchies, like when you want to highlight a particular word from a title:

<h1>
    O Brasil <strong>superou a crise</strong>
</h1>

This is a valid use case.