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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!

BoltClock
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medk
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    I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because this is not about programming but SEO. – Kyll Oct 29 '16 at 13:33

6 Answers6

79

Alt is not a valid attribute 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.
Mori
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The Surrican
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  • @medk: If this answer works for you, you should accept it. – George Cummins Jun 23 '11 at 13:26
  • Not that I doubt what you are saying, but could you possibly provide some sources to backup your statements about Google's handling of the title tag, etc? – mricci Feb 07 '13 at 03:42
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    i am sorry, but now. the information came to me partly by experience and more importantly on a private basis from employees of seo marketing firms. google deliberately does not publish details about their relevance algorithms so they cannot be exploitet, they only let loos informations on a need-to-now basis in the amount that they see benificial to encourage webmasters to produce what they see as high quality websites. – The Surrican Feb 07 '13 at 09:35
4

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>
Davis Peixoto
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  • ok the idea is that I'm developing a mini wordpress with pagination which contains many links to my pages and I thought about adding titles to the pagination links so they become SEO friendly as the are 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 ... and no text. so I thought about adding the titles so they describe the target pages and I get more SEO backlinks for my pages. – medk Oct 09 '10 at 00:26
  • you can add a better thing. I am talking about the rel attribute on the a tag. http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/links.html#linkTypes – Davis Peixoto Oct 09 '10 at 00:35
  • interesting values are: next, index, first, last, prev, up, archives... – Davis Peixoto Oct 09 '10 at 00:37
  • ah, and yes, this counts much more SEO value as it adds much more semantics to the code. – Davis Peixoto Oct 09 '10 at 00:38
  • thanks for the link but really I didn't get the point :( – medk Oct 09 '10 at 00:41
  • See edit for further example... – Davis Peixoto Oct 09 '10 at 00:48
  • That's a good idea! but could you explain how does this affect SEO? – medk Oct 09 '10 at 01:02
  • and for the other links: 4 5 6 7 8 9 .... I guess it should be rel="up" as I see in the table, right? – medk Oct 09 '10 at 01:09
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    Sure thing. There are a lot of factors for on-page SEO. Most relevant is content. Content is king. But all of us heard about optimizing the structure. Putting main stuff on H1 for example. This is structural optimization you can make. Composing nice HTML helps - a lot - on optimizing. This os one of those minor composition tips, that makes you page better composed - thus, has a better rank. – Davis Peixoto Oct 09 '10 at 01:12
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    for links 4, 5, 5... you should not mark at all. Up is for the uplevel link (the root index in that case). – Davis Peixoto Oct 09 '10 at 01:14
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    And I really think you should go read a little about Microformats and Google's Rich Snippets. Read about them, and you'll find a new world on composing for web. – Davis Peixoto Oct 09 '10 at 01:15
3

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

LDJ
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2

The text in the title attribute is not seen by crawlers. It won't cause keyword stuffing and it won't replace the anchor text for a given URL. It will, however, provide additional info if this is needed. Use it to help your visitors not your SEO efforts.

Corina Savin
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0

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.

BoltClock
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-1

Use this pseudo-code:

<a href="url" title="Title" ref="Ref" target="Target">Text</a>

For instance, this:

<a href="http://example.com" title="Example" ref="external" target="_blank">Example</a>

renders like this:

Example

Kyll
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CKaynak
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