Alt and Title attributes in img tag

[reshmi]

Is it useful to have both alt and title attributes in the img tag from SEO perspective?

[skweb]

It might not help you a great deal but it won't hurt. My experience is that it brings more traffic because it is not possible to describe what is in an image in the accompanying article but you can do that in the alt tag and when people specifically look for that stuff they can fine the page and the image.

[reshmi]

Thanks skweb! I knew about the alt tag. but i was wondering if the title tag in img is equivalently important, less imp or not imp at all. And wat purpose could it serve while the alt tag is existing.

[potentialgeek]

Not a good idea unless you're aiming for image search traffic. Even then you could still get whacked by Google for SPAM! I removed all the alt tags from my images. The more parts of your page that are identical, the easier it is to get a 950 Penalty (overoptimization).

[fishfinger]

Google only notices the alt tag if the image is a link - otherwise they ignore it for ranking purposes.

Doesn't mean they don't use it as a spam indicator as P/G says.

I always use title as this is fully cross-browser compatible, and only add an alt tag as well where the image is a link.

[phranque]

in short:
the title attribute is not indexed.
the alt attribute is required for accessibility.

the specification:
[w3.org...]
[w3.org...]

[reshmi]

<the title attribute is not indexed. >

that was news to me. so title attr is purely useful for human users, esp. with audio UAs. and search engines never bother about the content inside the title attr!

[tedster]

At the 2005 PubCon, Google engineers confirmed that the title attribute was not common enough for them to use it in the algo. In other owrds, it was too weak a signal. And that's what my testing showed up until then. I don't think thgis has changed, but I also stopped looking for it.

I still use the title attribute in key links, for usability sake. It's very helpful for the end user when a link cannot use appropriate anchor text because of how it appears on the page. but i look at a lot of source code in a day, and the title attribute is still a pretty rare find.