CSS and bold use

Keeping in tune with the whole CSS thing is bold <b></b> the best way to go about bolding a slection of text within a paragraph?

You probably don't want specifically bold text, you want to emphasise a word. The em element stands for emphasis, and the strong element stands for strong emphasis. The em element defaults to italic style, the strong element defaults to bold. Use the one that is semantically most appropriate of them, versus i or b elements.

:) Thanks very much for your help. I assume then that the em and strong tags can also have CSS applied to yield whatever format of emphasis you like?

Yeah you can.

But, if you're emphasising it to be a header, use <h1> to <h6> instead.

Also keep in mind the symantic tags like "abbr", "acronym", "address" and "cite". If the text you want to emphasize is any of those you should use the appropriate tag and not just a generic tag like strong or em.