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Valid markup can help the crawlability of your page and should also be encouraged as far as usability is concerned. But there's no difference in SEO if you add or remove a div tag. If you want to emphasize keywords on your page you might consider using "strong" or "em" tags. Also h tags e.g. h1, h2, ... have effect on SEO, although not the big effect it used to have some years ago.
What do you mean by saying "a div in place of normal text"? Apart from that, what's that got to do with CSS? All I see is valid markup and that's how wegpages should look. 
What do you mean by saying "a div in place of normal text"? Apart from that, what's that got to do with CSS? All I see is valid markup and that's how wegpages should look.
Valid markup can help the crawlability of your page and should also be encouraged as far as usability is concerned. But there's no difference in SEO if you add or remove a div tag. If you want to emphasize keywords on your page you might consider using "strong" or "em" tags. Also h tags e.g. h1, h2, ... have effect on SEO, although not the big effect it used to have some years ago.