<b> versus <strong>

Hi,
Both the above appear to do the same thing to text on a web page.
Have I misunderstood their use?
Do Search engines view them differently?
Thanks,
Blair

I think this explains it a little better than i ever could..
Logical Vs Physical Styles

I would go for <b> all the way... It's 3 characters (3 bytes) against 8 characters (8 bytes).

Now multiply this by 2 and add 1.
<b> + </b> = 7 characters
<strong> + </strong> = 17 characters

More 10 characters, more 10 bytes. Now multiply this by the bold tags you have and see how much you can save in webpage size. You may think this is a bit stupid, but I do this, dont use tabbed/idented code and optimize it by hand to keep it all together. This has save me a couple of kb on some pages (in some 2kb or more). Now see this sitewide... It will make your website load faster ;)

This is actually the same (very practical and visitor-oriented) reason why I prefer <B> too. If I want something strong, but different, I go for <EM>. CSS give you the power to change everything, so from a practical point of view you can do whatever you like. If you're into W3C, which has no direct influence on SEO, you can use <STRONG> instead.

I'd say G-bot would be very thick if it didn't regard them all as equivalent. Furthermore, I believe the effect of a change from one to another would not be worth the effort. Not even on MY site...

FWIW bold is a Deprecated Tag.

A good overview is
http://www.netmechanic.com/news/vol6/beginner_no11.htm

- Mike T.

LOL - that may be true, but I wouldn't risk betting on Google to equally value a phrase like <SPAN STYLE=font-weight:bold>keyword1 keyword2</SPAN>

Thanks for all the advice guys.

I can't prove it (I would like to, but I do not know how to set up the test), but I would say that the DOCTYPE affects the ranking indirectly by changing the weighting of the on page factors during indexing. So with XHTML documents I would play it safe and use <strong> and </em>.

I always use bold because this gives me flexibility regarding formatting later with CSS if I wan't to. But I never format my CSS like the example above (and that's not the same as a bold-tag). All formatting should be putted into a seperate CSS-file if possible.

Good tip, actually I did the exact same thing on my new site: go for XHTML, and use <strong> and <em>. That seems to be the logical step to take... I can always use inline styles or css to change the look.

The difference between the two is similar to that of <font size="-1"> versus <small>. Primarily that the character size builds up over time, and one is easier to type than the other should you be coding by hand.

I think eduardomaio has a point about the bit size. I am actually changing all my <strong> tags to <b> tags for another more SEO related reason rather than bit size, which is of course .. what this is all about.

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New around here... And read the thing about not bringing up old threads if it's not relevant.

However this thread has got me thinking about whether I should have <b>/<strong> in my websites at all?

In all honesty i use <strong> tags purely because it's very easy to just hit 'ctrl+b' on selected text in DW and it generates it for you..

Hmmm... food for thought I think. Going to see if it would be better to do bold stuff in the style sheet instead.

jonesyb, any update on this? Did you try changing things and if so, did it make any noticible difference?

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