Receptional_Andy - 6:57 pm on Nov 25, 2009 (gmt 0)

I'd say that's absolutely right - if you follow best practice in terms of CSS for design and HTML as the "building blocks" for content, then the benefits in terms of ease of interpretation and speed far outweigh any benefit you might get from using deprecated "visual" HTML elements.

A related area worth looking at is accessibility, since, by definition, search engines are visitors who are forced to "read" a page without the aid of, for instance, visual or audio elements.