<strong> or <b> tag?

[kidmercury]

does it make a difference which tag is used to make the text bold in terms of seo value -- <strong> or <b>? from what i've seen the <b> tag helps to optimize the words within the tag, although i havent seen anything mentioned about the <strong> tag, which essentially does the same thing.

[orion]

Hi, kidmercury.

Depends. Some IR systems does asign weight to the strong tag which is a structure and presentation tag. An example is given at the WLR (http://forums.searchenginewatch.com/showthread.php?t=2704&page=1&pp=20) thread.

The bold tag (b) as the italize (i) and font (font) are presentation-only tags and have been long ago deprecated by the W3C. They have been replaced as follows

b --> strong
i --> em
font-->CSS font-family

In XHTML, these tags cause documents not to validate.

Orion