Efficacy of title / alt tags.

[ephramzerb]

I've received some SEO suggestions after completing a re-design and I'm not fully tuned into the SEO world to be able to gauge the efficacy of these suggestions. Particularly interesting to me is the use / abuse of the title tag.

One of the suggestions was rather long title tags for the items found in the main navigation. Not tremendously bad keyword stuffing, but rather blatant nevertheless (in some occasions). The "title" attribute suggestions range from 10 - 20 words. Are there any best practices to approach the "title" attribute of the link tag?

Some overly-verbose suggestions were given in regards to the "alt" attribute of the "img" tag -- some were irrelevant to the image being displayed

[David Wallace]

The title attribute in hyperlinks has no affect, good or bad on SEO. They may look neat but are not going to help in an SEO effort. Therefore if they are stuffed full of keywords, they will look stupid.

Alt attributes can be useful when used in images that hyperlink to another page. They should then contain text that describes the page they are linking to.

[chilleds]

I agree with David, we've not seen any difference by using or not using the TITLE attribute.

[ephramzerb]

Thanks for your help and re-affirming my gut instinct that the suggestions were pretty absurd.

You're right, the quality of the site would be compromized with such over-the-top-long "title" attributes everywhere. As such, I'll still be using title attributes, but in a spartan fashion, which adds to the accessibility of the site, not as part of some hackneyed SEO effort.

And Dave, your suggestion regarding the use of the "alt" attribute for images was appreciated.

[ewc21]

You can use the feature to aid your visitors but even the title attribute is confused with alt attribute because of the way they behave on different browsers, namely IE and Firefox. Aim to use it for visitors and not for better rankings.