What is the impact of i
, b
, strong
or span
tags on SEO?
I quote the MDN HTML element reference:
The HTML
<b>
Element represents a span of text stylistically different from normal text, without conveying any special importance or relevance. It is typically used for keywords in a summary, product names in a review, or other spans of text whose typical presentation would be boldfaced. Another example of its use is to mark the lead sentence of each paragraph of an article.The HTML
<i>
Element represents a range of text that is set off from the normal text for some reason, for example, technical terms, foreign language phrases, or fictional character thoughts. It is typically displayed in italic type.The HTML Strong Element (
<strong>
) gives text strong importance, and is typically displayed in bold.
From these, the three of them could be used to highlight "important text". But I don't really know what would be the impact on the semantics, from a SEO perspective.
Until now, I was mostly using the span
tag with styling attribute in order to raise visual importance to important words without polluting the code with visual style items.
However, those important words, are indeed important. I mean that it could be smart to highlight them from a SEO perspective. span
being meaningless, switching to another tag may be a good idea after all.
Do you know if there are any differences between those three alternative tags to optimize search engine results?