It’s been quite a while since I last posted any testing ideas. The funny thing is that I went in and edited one of my old posts, and now the “improved” Blogger application thinks it’s a new post 
Hence… I decided to write a real new post this morning. Coming up with ideas to test can be difficult, particularly if you have already done quite a bit of optimization work on your pages. But have you ever considered finding a few key phrases in your sales copy, and applying a yellow highlighter like background to them?
This can be a real eye grabber and can really improve response in some circumstances. Most times we’ve tested it, it works well.
The key is to identify the main value propositions in your copy and apply a highlighter type style to them. Use something like this in your external style sheet to create the above effect:
.highlighter {
background-color: yellow;
}
Remember, your mileage may vary, so always test this with either a split test or multivariate test to confirm that it actually helps.
Warm Regards,
Scott Miller, CEO
Author of “The ConversionLab.com,” The worlds first “How to” guide to testing and optimization. Visit http://www.conversionlab.com/ for a special offer!
I’ve read about tests like these being performed but never one that was conclusive one way or another. I have read/heard of people saying highlighting or bolding targeted keywords within content can help the search engines see them better.
Because highlight text requires a custom style rule, I doubt that alone would be visible to search engines.
However, since the bold tags are standard markup, it would not surprise me if the engines used them to help figure out the contextual meaning of text.