What Is The HTML Strong Tag?

Date First Published: 14th November 2022

Topic: Web Design & Development

Subtopic: SEO

Article Type: Computer Terms & Definitions

Difficulty Level: 5/10

Learn more about what the HTML strong tag is in this article.

The HTML strong tag is used to define text with strong importance or urgency and improve readability. By default, putting text in between the <strong> and </strong> tags will make the text bold, although it can be customised in CSS.

Note:

Only use the strong tag to add importance to text. Do not use it to just make text bold. If you want to make text bold without adding any importance, use the <b> tag.

The main difference between the strong and bold tag is that the bold tag is used to draw attention to text and the strong tag is used to indicate that the text is an important word or section of the document and semantically highlight it. The difference between these two tags is unobvious at first as both are shown in bold. However, according to the W3C, a bold tag must always be displayed in bold and this is optional for a strong tag. Text within the strong tags does not have to be displayed in bold.

Benefits Of The Strong Tag

The use of the strong tag has a number of benefits, including:

• Improved readability - Using the strong tag to put emphasis on important text can grab the attention of readers better and ensure that they don’t miss out on important information. However, website owners should avoid using too many of these tags as it can make text look unnatural and overoptimised.
• Accessibility - Strong tags are often used by screen readers to put emphasis on important sections of text. These programs are often used by users with visual impairments so that they can understand the content of the website.

Example Of The Strong Tag

An example of the strong tag can be seen below.

SEO

The use of the strong tag can help with SEO as search engine bots may determine that text within the strong tags is more important and has more value. However, Matt Cutts of Google has confirmed in one of the webmaster videos that there is no difference between strong and bold tags when Google indexes websites. Google interprets those tags as the same things.

For SEO, it does not make much difference which of the two HTML tags are used and does not offer much chance of optimisation for a page.