Bold, underline, or italic tags help keywords?

<b>, bold tag, bold, <u>, underline tag, italic tag, <i>

[Illah]

We all know that keywords in <a> tags and <h1> tags are helpful to SEO, but what about <b>, <u> and <i> tags? Anyone have any success using this?

--Illah

[robotsdobetter]

The <b> tag works great and the italic tag works as well. Most of the time I don't use the underline tag, but it does work a LITTLE.

[Iinkpopularitypro]

The <B> and the <i> tags work great for me.

[Illah]

Cool, I've been hearing this for a while. Nice to see it works in practice!

--Illah

[mattx17]

I've been told by my hardcore programming buddies that <b> and <i> tags have been depricated. If you want to bold something, use <strong></strong> and if you want to italicize something use <em></em>.

I've read many a post that says bolding and emphasizing keywords does help.

[MatthewHSE]

I have one page that is well-optimized for a key phrase, very specific to our business. Starts out with a relevant <h1>, and good relevant content. Yet for that key phrase we're ranked #2 on Google.

The page that beats us is a "review site," where people can submit reviews about products they like. Someone gave us a nice review, but the page on which it appears has almost no content; just a sentence or two about the product in question that doesn't even mention our keywords. PR is 2 compared with our 4. The difference, though, is that the "heading" on this other page, comprised of the exact same wording as my <h1>, is surrounded by two <big> tags, like this:

<big><big>Key Phrase Here</big></big>

So it looks like the emphasis they place on the key phrase with the <big> tag is beating my cleaner, more semantic markup.

[Illah]

That's interesting how different versions of nearly the same thing, i.e. <b>, <strong>, and <big> can have such different results! I'd like to test that out a bit before making recommendations to clients though (unless someone has already tested and wants to share with us).

--Illah