What is the general best practice for bolding keywords in content?

Question

For example:

1. In a product description in a store, what are the best practices for bolding a product name that appears in the product description?
2. In a Blog, should you bold keywords for SEO, emphasis to the reader, both, or are there other reasons to utilize bold?

Answer 1

Below are the correct usage of the four elements to choose from. I would say if you are marking out something as important, you should use strong. Markup your content correctly. You never know the benefits. The content could be consumed by a screen reader, a RSS reader, insta-paper or some other uninvented device in the future.

Your Sites stylesheets should then take care of bolding the marked up words.

Usually marking your content up in a semantic way as possible has a net positive affect on SEO too, but a few strong words probably won't proppel you to number one on their own.

http://html5doctor.com/i-b-em-strong-element/

i — alternate voice such as transliterated foreign words, technical terms, and typographically italicized text

b — “stylistically offset” text, such as keywords and typographically emboldened text

em Stress emphasis, i.e., something you’d pronounce differently

strong — strong importance

Answer 2

From a UX point of view, I generally bolding words and sentences in a way that if the user only reads them, they will still get the idea of the text. It makes the text more scannable.

I don't think bolding text can have a true impact on SEO.