Is it still necessary to use bold and italic tags for seo?

[Happybranch980]

Does Google still look for bold and italic tags on a page for a higher seo score? I like to clean up as much code as I can so use them in my css style sheets but am I missing out on some optimisation as I use seo power suite and that keeps telling me i should be using <b> and <i> blocks on my page thus reducing my score as they are in my style sheets which powersuite cannot detect!

[Tony J]

Using tags like B, STRONG, U, I, EM etc can help search engines a bit to identify the keywords in an article when the keywords are not obvious for search engines. There is no harm in using them and it could help in some cases.

Whether to use B or STRONG - there is no clear answer. I have seen an interview from Matt Cutts where he says B tag has a slight advantage over STRONG.

[florence]

i will use <strong>

[Ted Chang]

actually google don't care about this

[Didik]

necessary for visitor, it makes easy to reading. Bold and italic mean important things, but for search engine it means nothing

[Sibz]

Yes. They help Search Engines to identify the keywords in the content of your website.

Regards.

[Abbie]

Bold text is given more weight than ordinary text.

[Hal Smith]

I dont use them anymore and still get results.

Hal Smith
SEO Consultant - URLDreamer.com

[Jerome]

Yes, Google need very professional content in a webpage to evaluate well to index as top one. If article has Proper title relevant to blog, Title has h1 or h2 tag, then summary related to title, summary title with h2 or h3 tag then article description content with bold, italic and underline tag would help as quality content.

These thing will help your article to index in any search engine. You can learn more about it via SEO service too. http://www.indiaseotraining.in/2012/07/s...alore.html

[Brian]

No, after Penguin its not necessary - focus instead on good quality content. In fact, overdoing bold, italics etc can trigger an over-optimization penalty and get you hammered!