Strong Tag versus Bold Tag for SEO

Looking a bit more into SEO, I thought I would time some time to address a question that pops up quite often in the world of search engine optimization. The question is, which is better to use, the <b> tag or the <strong> tag for (SEO) search engine optimization purposes. I will attempt to define the definitions of the <b> tag and the <strong> tag below, that you can understand easily.

<b> tag - actually represents the encapsulated word in bold, however it doesn't change the semantic meaning of the word. Furthermore, when reading the encapsulated text there is no emphasis added.
* If you decided that you want to display a word or sentence in bold on a web page, you would use the <b> tag as follows.  - - Example of HTML code: This site has some really good <b>SEO Tips</b>. - -

<strong> tag - actually represents the encapsulated word in bold. However, it does change the semantic meaning of the word. Furthermore, when reading the encapsulated text, you will read it louder and boldly if you compare it to the bold tag.
* If you decided that you wanted to display a word or sentence in strong on a web page, you would use the <strong> tag.  - - Example of HTML code: This site has some really good <strong>SEO Tips</strong>. - -

It has been said that Google still shows a preference to the blog <b> tag over the strong <strong> tag. With that said, let's not all of us webmasters jump on the band wagon at once and start tweaking our sites for the bold <b> tag.

However, it was also stated by Matt Cutts, fairly recently that Google treats the bold <b> tag the same as the strong <strong> tag. ( More reason to slow down the team of horses pulling the band wagon )

Therefore, if you are into semantic markup, I would suggest using the strong <strong> tag over the bold <b> tag for SEO purposes.

If you are a webmaster that uses SEO software, you may be seeing some warnings pertaining to the <b> tag and <strong> tag. This is caused by the software because it doesn't know how to handle the <strong> tag. I suggest that you contact the software vendor and see if they will update their software to recognize the <strong> tag.

Hope this blog post was helpful to you, "Strong Tag versus Bold Tag for SEO"  Be sure to share this post with your friends on Twitter. Furthermore, I appreciate your time that you have spent here!

Spunky Jones.

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