Variations in Strong Tags counts how many keyword variations appear inside text a page marks as strongly important with the strong element. It returns a variation occurrence count for the cleaned contents of every bounded strong tag — a signal that tracks with position within a result set, not a lever that makes a page rank.
| Factor ID | RG-KWD-083 |
|---|---|
| Family | Keyword Usage & Density |
| Measurement | Variation occurrence count |
| Measured zone | Cleaned strong contents |
What it measures
This factor counts keyword variations inside text that a page has marked as strongly important. It looks only at what sits within strong elements — the words an author has deliberately emphasized as significant — and reports how many topical variations land there.
How RankGear measures it
RankGear extracts the bounded contents of each strong element, cleans their HTML, and sums case-insensitive whole-word variation matches across the cleaned text. Matching is whole-word and case-insensitive, so emphasis on a variation is counted the same whether it is written in upper or lower case, and partial substrings inside larger words do not count.
What RankGear looks for
<strong>installing a heat pump</strong> → cleaned, then matched against the variation set
<b style="font-weight:700">heat pump</b> → not a strong element, not measured
<span style="font-weight:bold">...</span> → CSS bolding, not measured| If the page is… | How to read it |
|---|---|
Emphasizing many topical variations in strong | Emphasis is likely diluted; reserve strong for genuinely important statements. |
Using strong sparingly on truly important lines | Healthy — emphasis keeps its meaning where it matters. |
Bolding with CSS instead of strong | Those words are not measured; the count reads them as absent. |
How to optimize it
Use strong selectively for genuinely important statements, letting topical terms appear inside it only where emphasis actually helps comprehension. Treat the count as an observation about how a page uses emphasis, not a target to inflate — adding strong around keywords purely to raise the number works against the purpose of emphasis.
Important considerations
- CSS bolding without a
strongelement is not measured — only realstrongtags count. - HTML is cleaned before matching, so markup inside the emphasized text does not affect the count.
- Excessive emphasis weakens its meaning; when everything is marked important, nothing reads as important.
- Strong formatting alone does not make a term more relevant, and this factor is a correlational signal — it relates to position within a measured result set and does not guarantee or cause a ranking.
Related factors
Part of the Factors reference · how RankGear measures · glossary.