Looking for some views on this. I've come across some people doing SEO work who seem to have a love affair with the emphasis tag - <em>this one</em> They're constantly putting these tags around keywords they want to target. I can't see how it's more important that title, headers, etc. I'd be interested to hear what other people think.
Basic onsite SEO. Use <strong> and <em> tags (sparingly) along with <h> tags to help the SE's know what the page is about. Overuse may be a signal of spam.
I would be surprised if Google's formula gave significantly more weight to <strong>, <b>, <i>, etc. But I'm just guessing (as is anyone, unless they have inside knowledge of Google's algorith). Honestly, I think such fine details are rather negligible. I have top 10 ranking sites that are SEO nightmares (no h1/h2, etc), but they rank well purely because of inbound links.
The emphasis element isn't more important than the title or heading elements for ranking purposes, but it is a very powerful psychological device. When used properly, you can not only improve your rankings for some keywords (depending on how competitive they are and the way they're applied to the Web page) but also improve your conversion rates significantly. Of course, most people don't understand this, and the majority of those who think they do really don't. I don't even consider it to be SEO most of the time. It's more of a typographic and copywriting convention than anything, to be honest. It's just that the search engines treat it as a potential ranking factor in their algorithms, so SEOs naturally tend to put their keywords in them. Given how B, EM, I and STRONG are inline elements, I'd be very surprised if they gave them more weight than they would the descriptive block level elements and page title as well. But then again, I don't need to guess how the search engines weigh HTML elements and attributes anyway -- I just refer to the HTML and XHTML specifications. Why don't you? (I'm just curious is all.)
Yes that's what I thought guys thanks. The people who are doing it are trying to compete on keywords in a small but highly competitive niche the <em> around those keywords looked like scraping the bottom of the barrel to me. Actually Dan I've read your excellent & informative post here "All you Need to Know About SEO" some time back, don't recall you ever mentioning anything about <em> tags. As I understood their SEO benefit is simply the normal benefit one receives through having clean, easily-digestible markup. Though I did, however, hear something about <em>perhaps</em> being able to use <em> tags to get yourself in Google define:results. Experimenting with it myself right now, as I've nothing to loose in doing so, though no results so far. Could well just be an old SEO folk story.
As i think so <em> or <b> tag don't have the potential to raise the website in top 10.Google neglect it. drupal services India search engine optimization services