Making your keyword stand out in search engines: bold vs. strong?
August 1st, 2008If you’ve been following web development over the past couple years you’ve undoubtedly heard the arguments for separating markup from style information. You know, instead of using tags like <font> and <b> you should be using <span> and applying formatting via CSS. Great advice for sure - but what do the search engines think?
For this test we decided to see whether markup or style could communicate the importance of a single keyword to the search engine crawlers. In our test we created 3 pages: the first contained our keyword with no markup or styling, the second contained the same keyword but placed within bold tags (<b></b>), and the third contained the keyword within <strong> tags. Common wisdom is that <strong> is the better choice because it is markup (rather than a specific style) and thus communicates something (importance) about the words other than how they should look.
Anyway, the result: the search engines still prefer bold to strong. In fact, this is the first time in all our tests that both Google and Yahoo! agree - bold is more important than strong. Interestingly neither search engine picked up our page without any emphasis on the test keyword.
What does this mean? For me it means that I’m not quite ready to start replacing all my bold tags with strong tags. Honestly I understand and agree with the need for separating markup from style information. But it’s just too convenient to simply slap a <b> around a couple words than to go through the trouble of defining a style and calling it via <span class=”important”> or even <strong> which is 3 times as long as good old <b>. Funny thing is, it looks like for now Google and Yahoo agree with me 
