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Strong and emphasis
When you’re formatting the text on your web site, how do you format the bold and italic words? Do you use the <b>bold</b> and <i>italics</i> tags? If you do, you should consider using CSS formatting as discussed earlier. When you format a word with <bold>, the actual site visitor can see and understand why the word is bold. A search engine crawler, and a screen reader, cannot. All the crawler or screen reader sees is the <bold> tag. There’s no “emotion” associated with it.
A much better use of your HTML is to use the <strong>strong</strong> and <em>emphasis </em> tags. The <strong> tag translates into bold formatting and the <emphasis> tag translates into italics formatting. And the difference is that when a search engine crawler or screen reader encounters these tags, it knows to pay attention to the word or words that are included in the container .
Those words within the container will also be given more weight. So, if you simply boldface or italicize your keywords, they will look just like any other words on the page when the crawler or screen reader comes through. But using the <strong> and <emphasis> tags around your keywords tells those bots to notice that the following words have importance and are more than simply additional words in the text of a page.
A much better use of your HTML is to use the <strong>strong</strong> and <em>emphasis </em> tags. The <strong> tag translates into bold formatting and the <emphasis> tag translates into italics formatting. And the difference is that when a search engine crawler or screen reader encounters these tags, it knows to pay attention to the word or words that are included in the container .
Those words within the container will also be given more weight. So, if you simply boldface or italicize your keywords, they will look just like any other words on the page when the crawler or screen reader comes through. But using the <strong> and <emphasis> tags around your keywords tells those bots to notice that the following words have importance and are more than simply additional words in the text of a page.