Every other week I read that it's a good idea to write the more important parts of a text block in bold letters, that's what I also do myself to ensure that the important parts stand out... not necessarily for the spiders but also for human readers. Lately I tend to use <strong> instead of <b> because that's how you're supposed to do it with the new web standards I believe. Do you think it makes a different SEO-wise? Or should I stick with the older <b> instead to make sure?
It does not matter. Bold is bold. You can also capitalize the first letter of the keywords. It should help a tiny bit.
I take it that you are talking about doing this within the body of a paragraph or text. I still think <h> tags are superior to <b> or <strong> for actual headings?
And (per at least one earlier post of the Blademaster Compar) the Title tag is the most superior of all!
Hello mxlabs Lately I tend to use <strong> instead of <b> because that's how you're supposed to do it with the new web standards I believe. You are correct <b> is being deprecated and at some time in the future(no one knows yet) that tag among many others will no longer be supported in current browsers. So build your site towards the future. Also you dont have to use the strong or bold tags if you use css to apply your style. hth
It's not that <b> is being "deprecated". The reasoning, which is old and sound, is that as much rendering as reasonably possible should be left to the discretion of the client. When you want text to be "strong" or "emphasized", you use those tags and let the browser decide what the actual effect used is. But the <b> and <i> tags remain, and will remain, for those uses where you need to actually assure that that is the effect rendered. (That is most likely to come with italics.) So you can follow the guidelines quite intelligently and produce a document that has all four tags in it: strong, bold, emphasized, and italic. What may change in time is how "strong" and "emphasized" are typically rendered by browsers, with perhaps some effects other than boldfacing and italics coming into fashion.
I would suggest you use http://www.w3.org standards and thats the best as far as I think. I dont think anyone here would deny that also. HTML standards can be found at http://www.w3.org/TR/html4 Thanks -Shabbir Bhimani