encyclo - 12:41 am on May 12, 2005 (gmt 0)

Another long thread about the difference between <b> and <strong> here:

[webmasterworld.com...]

brunner mentions the semantic aspect of <strong> and the meaningless of <b> in terms of screenreaders (and welcome to WebmasterWorld brunner!). Whereas in fact most screenreaders blithely ignore both elements, as the original question was the importance for SEO you could argue that because your bolded text is more for the benefit of ranking rather than users then the semantically-meaningless <b> would be actually more appropriate. Bear in mind that both elements are valid markup in all current standards, transitional or strict.

As for whether the SEs give extra weight to text within <b> or <strong> tags, the former is far more widespread than the latter, but I know of no real hard evidence either way of their respective effects in terms of better ranking. Any influence would be minimal, so don't get too caught up on it: concentrate your work on other more important areas such as writing content and link-building.