Does **tag on a product description help?**

[YNWA]

Hi,

Does using the tag on a line of text in the products description help with SEO for that keyword phrase?

**See here: http://www.designerboutique-online.com/tops/passarella-death-squad/passarella-death-squad-t-shirt-white/0/

I have bolded the Passarella Death Squad T-Shirt line. Would this help in any way?

Cheers

Will**

[earlyadopter]

Great question, but the short answer is “No”. Back in 1996 it may have been a small contributing factor but not today.

But…

The strong tag does have another propose.

So lets say we have an article that’s quite wordy. We all know the average web user isn’t going to read it all so this is where the strong tag can be of used.

Emphasising keywords or sentences using the bold tag is a great way of getting the message across and noticed

[YNWA]

Hi Kieran,

Thanks for your reply. They are not a band but a designer clothing label.

The price reflect the quality of the fabric, made from fine japanese fabric. Some of the descriptions say this but I should really get it in all of them.

The problem I see is were getting hundereds of items online, going into great detail on each item description is a task upon its self.

Maybe the t-shirt image blurb would be useful as it will tell the customer exactly what it stands for.

Within that description, how many times would be recommend to get the words "passarella death squad t-shirt" in there? Currently aiming for about twice, is this ok?

Cheers

Will

[EssEEmily]

I agree that there is probably next to no SEO value for using the **tag here. What I do like is that it works from a usability standpoint. To me it is natural for that line to be bolded because it is the name of the product. It makes the name stand out a bit and makes it easier for the user to know what they are looking at. For that, +1. **

[kdaly100]

Agree strongly Valery there (get it - sorry saddo response)

Strong is coming to the fore more as the default for bold on most WYSIWYG editors but I don't think Google worries too much about it.  There was a lot of activity in making your first use keywords bolded for the first paragraphs to help SEO but for product pages I would personally concentrate on adding content so for the T-Shirt page that you refer to here I would write a little blurb about the group, mention the material of the T-Shirt.  Even a short blurb as to what the image on the T-Shirt is about.

You are looking for people who are fans of this group (never heard of them myself) who search online   If this is one opf their songs then perhaps a YouTube link.  Looks like there are a lot of vendors out there selling T-Shirts of this type so make the page stand out.

IMHO bold/strong is the least of your concerns.  Work the group angle as hard as possible.  The T-Shirts aren't a cheap item so you should explain in the text what makes them worth the price.

[icecarats]

From what I can tell SEO-wise they're basically the same, and they may not have any benefit at all. This is gut feel (since Google doesn't exactly publish this stuff) but strong/bold might be comparable to H5 1/2 or something like that relevance-wise.

Where it gets interesting though is semantics. STRONG implies emphasis, where BOLD is a formatting choice. From what I've been reading some semantic aware systems would give STRONG priority, whereas they would treat BOLD the same as Font-color=Blue, or some other non-semantic signal. Because of this Strong is interpreted differently in some specialist systems (e.g. readers for the blind, certain mobile browsers), but that becomes more a client side concern than an SEO one.

From a standards perspective there's some discussion saying that in the XHTML 2.0 spec Bold is actually being deprecated in favor of Strong:

http://www.webhostingtalk.com/archive/index.php/t-257310.html

Given all of that, my guess is Strong may have some weight, but not enough to be a critical factor that's going to put you 'over the top' in any meaningful way. I also don't think it hurts unless abused, and again that would only be for semantic-aware clients like visual readers and so on.