All Bold is No Bold – A New Paradigm for SEO

I used to work in corporate public relations, and produced a lot of printed materials: magazines, newsletters, that type of thing. Printers and typographers have a saying: “All bold is no bold.” Meaning, if you boldface everything on the page, it’s the equivalent of boldfacing nothing, because nothing stands out.

This has relevance to the world of search engine optimization. I’m hereby making up a new saying for SEO:

A page that’s about everything isn’t about anything.

In my experience, it’s nonproductive to try to optimize every page in a web site for the overall topic the site is about. The key is to create individual pages about specific sub-topics, and optimize the heck out of each of those pages for the specific topic.

Say you have a site about widgets. Don’t try to make the entire site rank for “widgets.” It ain’t gonna work.

Instead, make a page about “small red widgets” — and make that page be entirely and only about “small red widgets.” Make another page about “lightweight aluminum widgets” — and that page should be entirely about lightweight aluminum widgets. And another page could be about “heavy duty industrial widgets” (and nothing else).

Don’t make a page about small red widgets, lightweight aluminum widgets, and heavy duty industrial widgets. It likely won’t rank well for any of those terms, nor for “widgets” as a generic term. Because that page is trying to be about everything, but you’re not giving Googlebot the clear indicators it needs to figure out what the page is about.

Use your title tags, your headlines, the textual content, photo captions, anchor text, and all other indicators to make it absolutely, 100%, unmistakably clear to Googlebot that this page is about small red widgets, and that page is about lightweight aluminum widgets, and that other page is about heavy duty industrial widgets.

Remember: A page that’s about everything isn’t about anything. Tattoo that on your forehead.

And don’t forget: All bold is no bold.