Is it good to include title="" within your links?

Question

I am developing a website and for the main navigation, I was thinking it would be a good idea to include the title attribute.

<a href="/results/" title="Results">Results</a>

Is this a good thing to do? Also, is it good for SEO and accessibility?

Answer 1

It is a great thing to do. For accessibility, for SEO, for standards, for good netiquette.
You may want to make them slightly more descriptive though: title="Results of your Search" or "Results of Test #2"

Answer 2

Yes, very important for users of your site using assistive technologies like screenreaders.

Answer 3

It also helps if you want to be a bit more verbose and you don't have much space for the real link text.

Answer 4

Also, to add to the other answers, if you do any automated testing it's nice to have as many attributes as possible to be able to identify the various widgets.

Answer 5

From this article:

The TITLE attribute is useful in places where your HTML design limits the length of your link text.

That's often the case for links in a navigation bar, especially if your page has a multi-column layout.

Try using the TITLE attribute to give your visitors extra navigation information.

There was some concern about the support of this feature in the early days (1998!), but it is now a great way to reinforce the so-called information scent

Answer 6

Check out H33: Supplementing link text with the title attribute.

It's good to do for the sake of a more semantically meaningful document and potentially adds SEO value, but different browsers have different levels of support for it.

• You can't search for title text in a document via the keyboard
• You can't control the appearance, location, or duration of the title element (without replacing titles with some Javascript bastardization)
• People using screen readers might find it awkward to hear both link text and a description of it (although at least with JAWS, you can change a setting to enable / disable this)