Slot titles and features should be italicized or not?

[themilann]

Hey guys,

Maybe this is not the right place to post a thread like this (feel free to delete/move it accordingly), but I have a question about slot reviews and how to write them.

Namely, one of our clients wants us to make slot titles, as well as the features, italicized.

I was wondering about your experience and your thoughts on this. I know this doesn't affect SEO friendliness of a piece, but it certainly affects user friendliness as italics may attract users to pay attention to certain parts of the text. The best case scenario is that it converts users and make them deposit.

What are your thoughts on this?

Do you make some parts of your content bolded, italicized, etc?

Thanks!

[DaftDog]

Do you make some parts of your content bolded, italicized, etc?

Thanks!

Ideally, the use of bold and italics should be used for emphasis purposes only. But it's a free world, so do as you please.

https://grammar.yourdictionary.com/p...italicize.html

[chaumi]

I suspect here that they are really looking at this from a cosmetic viewpoint (ie just how it looks)...maybe they just have an internal 'rule' that this is how they present that sort of info and they want to keep it consistent (or maybe their own previous experience is that it does have an impact in different ways).

It's possible they are taking the same line as you might see with with film titles, video game titles, books etc where those are often traditionally written in italics (or at least I've seen them presented in that way many times)......but that doesn't explain why they would want the features in italics too.

Italics and bold have both been widely reported in the past to have an SEO impact - and I believe still do - although IMHO the impact value changes in different (Google) updates and it may/may not be so useful now as it was...

But my impression is that it's the words/phrases that are bolded or italicized that count. So - if that's correct - you might think that italicizing all features might be confusing the issue (because in this action you'll be italicizing non-directly associated words along with all the directly relevant ones)

So.....take a page about xxxxxx slot review

In the body you might have xxxxx, slot review, slots, review all bolded along with highly related terms like free spins etc. You could say that apart from any SEO value, these might be having user experience value (ie they know they're on the 'right' page for their query because the terms they are expecting to see can easily be seen by skimming/scanning the page).....and, of course, if you enhance the user experience in any way, you're enhancing SEO alongside.

This last point is slightly negated by the fact that (assuming they got there with a search engine search)....they should already know they're on the right page because of the Title/Description (now where have I heard that before )

The mentions of xxxxx slot (where they appear in the body) may be italicized.

The two combined are giving a count of italicized and bolded terms on the page.


I don't believe there is any info anywhere that spells out the optimal distribution/count (and very likely if there is one it probably needs to go on a per number words basis)....and to prove it works (or even that it doesn't) for any direct SEO value is near impossible (because of all the other 100 - 1000 things that will be having an impact as well, and in some cases a much bigger one)

[chaumi]

PS an additional thought........it may have been in the past that bolded/italicized terms helped Google 'pick out' those on a page and that's where any weight was coming from...but they are much better now at picking out in-content elements from deep in page and displaying in search as the query answer (as per fairly recent update).

It may well be that there is no longer any direct SEO benefit (ie direct to the algorithm from that pure action on the terms) from doing it.

[gm2891]

I think anything should be used in a proper way. And ANY tricks that may work now to try to manipulate Goggle rankings will become useless early or late, making site owners remove/change any stupid things they've done previously.

Italics and bold are used to add importance to words, phrases or sentences, but it becomes unimportant if it's overused and simply annoys most.

[themilann]

I think anything should be used in a proper way. And ANY tricks that may work now to try to manipulate Goggle rankings will become useless early or late, making site owners remove/change any stupid things they've done previously.

Italics and bold are used to add importance to words, phrases or sentences, but it becomes unimportant if it's overused and simply annoys most.

Yes, that also makes sense to me.

I think people pay too much attention on finding out how Google algorithm works, while most attention should be paid on creating and delivering valuable content to the readers.

That said, if you suspect that bold/italic words are making a difference in terms of SEO and you overuse them, this might affect your user friendliness, thus decreasing your traffic and conversion.