Analysis of the difference between bold <b> and <strong>

All of us webmasters know that when optimizing a website, bolding the keywords in the article is extremely beneficial to the optimization.
But if you look carefully, you will find that strong and b both have the function of bolding. For example, in WordPress, when bolding text, the system will use the strong tag by default. So which one should be used? Below Beijing SEO will analyze the usage and differences of the <strong> and <b> tags.

For example, we see the same bold effect for <strong>website optimization</strong> and <b>website optimization</b>. Therefore, both the B label and the Strong label are visually bold.

However, the B tag itself does not have HTML semantics. People who are proficient in HTML will soon know that this tag only means bold in HTML code. The Strong tag has semantics of emphasis in HTML, indicating emphasis and emphasis on tone.

Data shows that when blind people use screen readers, they can clearly see the difference between B and Strong. When encountering B, read it as you would any other word. When encountering Strong, emphasize the word and pause. From the perspective of WEB standards, the use of B tags is not recommended, but Matt from Google once said that the B tag has a slight advantage, although it was later revised to have the same advantages as the strong tag. Search engines are user-centric. When we cannot judge which one has more advantages, we might as well start from the user's perspective.

The impact of b and strong on SEO

The definition of HTML tags is not arbitrary, but has certain semantics. From this perspective, tags such as H1 are mainly used in titles, while STRONG focuses more on content application, such as keyword identification. Of course, this is not necessarily fixed. For example, some websites use the STRONG tag to emphasize the subheadings, which is also acceptable. But it should be noted that excessive use of the STRONG tag may also result in search engine penalties.

Judging from the definitions, semantics, and usage of the STRONG and B tags, STRONG has gradually replaced the B tag. This is normal according to WEB standards. Google has also gradually increased the weight of STRONG.

One more thing to note is that the STRONG tag must be written on the page. Through experiments, it is found that STRONG defined by CSS is useless for inclusion and ranking. Although robots can crawl CSS files, it is estimated that search engines only crawl the content.

In summary: Generally speaking, the weight of STRONG is much higher than that of B label, and we basically do not discuss the role of B label here, but for H label, the role of STRONG is slightly smaller. Therefore, these tags can basically be ranked as follows: H1>H2>H3>STRONG.

From this point of view, I think search engines are more likely to give greater weight to the strong tag. You can do an SEO experiment and make two pages with the same content. Use the B tag and the strong tag to emphasize the title or keywords. After they are included, search for the keyword in major search engines to see which tag-wrapped page has a higher ranking priority. It is also possible that two labels have exactly the same weight.

So how to use the strong tag? Currently, the SEO community generally uses the heading tag as a means to enrich the text format. The suggestion is "Generally speaking, a page is only allowed to have one H1 tag, the number of H2 tags can be increased to 2, and the number of H3 tags can be increased to about 3. There is no benefit in excessive use of heading tags." The control on the number of tags is relatively loose. Of course, the main thing is to not affect the user experience. You can't emphasize all the main keywords to be optimized, right? The strong tag is used to emphasize keywords, but if it is used too much, it will "dilute" the keywords and even make the search engine judge it as cheating. In short, just be natural.