Link Titles

Have they always been around?

[spikedo55]

Okay, I've designed a few websites already, but this is completely foreign to me. Truly, until I came to this site, I had never heard nor ran across link titles before. Please, somebody clue me in. How important are these? Is there a strategy behind them? Do they improve page rankings? How long or short should they be? I feel so, so, noobish...

[buckworks]

Here's an article about link titles by Jakob Nielsen (January 1998) that you might find helpful.

[useit.com...]

He does not write from an SEO perspective at all, but in my experience things that make your pages more usable or more relevant for human visitors do indeed tend to help you in the search engines.