Visual attention is a zero-sum game

The amount of attention a person allocates to your webpage is fixed, and you decide how that attention is distributed.

When you make a word bold, attention is distributed towards the bold word, and away from everything else.

What if you want to distribute attention away from the bold word and towards a link? Do you make that link larger? Bolder?

Distributing attention like this can turn into an arms race. More bold! More contrast! Like a chef adding more and more spices as each flavor overpowers the others.

Instead of bolding the word in the first place why not reduce the importance of everything else? It has the same effect on attention, but it drives towards simplicity instead of complexity, like the home page at dropbox.com.

Visual attention is a zero sum game. If everything is important, than nothing is.

For more on this topic, see Simplicity takes Restraint.