Hi,

Sorry that my first contribution to this forum is a question but I have spent the last couple of days perusing the fantastic content but not found the answer to my question.

I am currently doing some SE work for a large corporate here in Australia and I provided them with a 101 course highlighting the various internal site factors to help improve Keyword rankings.

When mentioning the use of Underlining this caused a bit of a stir.

The usability standard across the board says that an underlined word is normally a link, however most SE work specifies this as one of the techniques along with Bolding and Italicising.

So my questions are:
- is Underlining still an effective technique to be using?
- are you doing it and would you recommend a business do it?
- do you know of any examples with Fortune 500's or top Corporate Companies in your country, or even examples with any Popular website that I can use to demonstrate this technique.

Thanks
Justin Bryce

Use CSS

HTML:
<div class='content'>
.......
<u>keyword</u> ........ ........
......
</div>

CSS:
.content u {
text-decoration:none;
}

The <u>...</u> adds the emphasis, the CSS removes the underlining

Hi Justin,

Welcome to the SEW forums.
1. however most SE work specifies this as one of the techniques along with Bolding and Italicising.
Underlining is a deprecated presentation element - not a semantic element - much like the font attribute "size" or "color". It's for presentation - it has no semantic meaning in HTML.

I believe underlining body text would only cause confusion from a usability perspective; and from my experience underlining (and other presentational html tags) have never added anything from an SEO perspective.
2. No
3. No

I have heard that SE's like bolded keywords

Yes, bolding is another of the variables touted as effecting the organic results. Bolding is not an issue as it is easy to implement and has less impact on usability.

Where underlining can be very confusing as users expect an underlined word to be a link.

So do you underline? Do you know of any corporates who underline?

Yes, bolding is another of the variables touted as effecting the organic results. Bolding is not an issue as it is easy to implement and has less impact on usability.

Where underlining can be very confusing as users expect an underlined word to be a link.

So do you underline? Do you know of any corporates who underline?

We do not underline, and we are a corporate...........