TITLE and LONGDESC Attributes

Are the search engines using them?

[chameleon]

It's a common trick to put keywords in the ALT attribute of an IMG tag, but does anyone know if the major search engines look at the TITLE or LONGDESC?

[tedster]

I know that Google indexes the title attribute when it's used in an anchor tag or a blockquote tag. In an anchor tag, it also has some clout for the target page of the link. I don't have evidence one way or the other for title attributes in image tags.

The londesc, as I understand it, was created for accessibility purposes and should be a URL - where an image is too important to a page to explain it's meaning reasonably in an alt attribute. Again, since it is a url, I would imagine it gets followed (again, no proof). But I would doubt that just putting keywords in a logdesc would work.

W3C Web Accessibility Initiative: longdesc attribute [w3.org]

If the information contained in the image is important to the meaning of your page (i.e. some important content would be lost if the image was removed) , then you must provide a longer description than the "alt" attribute can reasonably display. The "longdesc" attribute was created for this reason.

<IMG SRC="graph1.gif" LONGDESC="graph1.htm" ALT="3-d sales chart.">

Future browsers or other agents will provide an optional a link to the description file called "graph1.htm".

[tedster]

While I was poking around for some answers on this, I found that longdesc can be used in framesets (and iframes) W3C Reference [w3.org].

If those do get noticed by search engines, it certainly opens up some possibilities. It's worth an experiment, which I'm going to do. I'll report back if I find anything useful.