SEO title vs alt vs text

Question

Hello everybody! Does the title attribute in a link do the job of the real text in the link for SEO? i.e

<a href="..." title="Web Design">Web Design</a>

is it the same as:

<a href="..." title="Web Design">click here</a>

when trying to get a good page rank for keywords like "web design"? is it like alt attribute in an image tag? or is it useless in SEO?

is it the same as:

<a href="..." alt="Web Design">click here</a>

what's the difference between all the above?

Thank you in advance!

Answer 1

Alt is no valid tag for a elements.

• Use alt to describe images
• Use title to describe where the link is going.
• The textvalue (click here) is the most important part The title attribute gets more and more ignored. Google looks far more on the link text than the title attribute. For google the title tag is like a meta tag which is not important compared to content.
• Image alt tags are however still very important (especially for image search)
• The main feature of those tags is to provide usability for your users, not to feed informatino to search engines.

Answer 2

alt is only valid for images — it's alternate text that serves for screen readers and people with images turned off to understand what an image represents.

title applies to most (if not all) elements, and can be used to provide tooltips for more information about parts of your pages.

I don't think either attribute plays any major roles in SEO. As Joe Hopfgartner says, the actual text of your links is much more significant in terms of semantics, which is why using "click here" as link text is discouraged these days.

Answer 3

title attribute hasn't the same value as link text on SEO.

between

<a href="..." title="Web Design">Web Design</a>

and

<a href="..." title="Web Design">click here</a>

stick with the first option. But it is duplicate data, and has no real aggregate value on the case.

The main title purpose, it to give a tooltip about the link's page title. Putting the linked page title is the correct application (think on user first).

The alt attribute is for allow non-textual content to be represented. Consider the examples on WHATWG: http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/embedded-content-1.html#alt

EDIT

<a href="http://yoursite.com/posts.php?page=1" rel="prev">1</a>
<span>2</span>
<a href="http://yoursite.com/posts.php?page=3" rel="next">3</a>
...
<a href="http://yoursite.com/posts.php?page=27" rel="last">27</a>

Answer 4

The title tag should be used to provide ADDITIONAL information for an element such as a link. If your title tag duplicates the actual link text then it will have no SEO benefit (there are arguments that the duplication could have a slight negative effect too). If, however, you can provide additional, meaningful information on the link such as further details about the content linked (especially if it links to a filetype that Google wouldn't be able to access/index) then they're definitely worth having.

Even as the tooltip in the browser, having a tooltip with the same text as the link text makes no sense, so as a rule of thumb only use it when you have something additional to add, not duplicate.

HTH