TwoLittleFishes Web design blog

Highlighting key words and phrases

The simplest way to make text more easy to scan is by highlighting key words and phrases. The most obvious way to highlight text is by using bold or italics. Be careful though because if you highlight too much, nothing stands out.

Why is highlighting key words and phrases important?

When people are trying to find information on a Web site, they usually scan the text looking for key words or phrases.

These key words and phrases either act as sign posts to a larger piece of information or can be important pieces of information themselves.

How to highlight key words and phrases (and how not to)

There are a number of ways to highlight text, some of the ways that you might highlight text in other places should not be used on Web sites.

Do highlight key words and phrases by using:

• bold text (this is sometimes called strong emphasis);
• numerals (e.g. 5) instead of words (e.g. five) for factual information (numbers help the text stand out among words);
• colour (but don’t use blue, see below for the reason why).

Italic text is often also used, however it can be harder to read. If you want to use it then I’d suggest no more than 2 words of italic text.

Don’t highlight key words and phrases by using:

• ALL CAPITAL LETTERS (using all capital letters is considered shouting and seen as rude);
• underlined text (underlining usually means that the text is a link);
• blue text (again blue text usually means that the text is a link).

Capital letters are not only considered shouting and seen as rude, capital letters are more difficult to read. When text is all in capital letters it takes people longer to read because the letter shapes are less distinct than lower case letters.

In fact people often ignore text in capitals altogether as Susannah Ross says in her book “Writing for the Web“:

The irony is that in text where writers put important information in capitals precisely to draw our attention to it, we tend to skip it.

Don’t highlight too many key words and phrases otherwise nothing stands out. Only highlight words and phrases that help people find the right part of the page to get the information they are looking for or important pieces of information.

---

Tags: CMS (Content Management Systems), Highlighting text, SEO (Search engine optimisation), Valuable content, Writing for the Web

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 16th, 2008 at 9:06 am and is filed under Writing for the Web.