what about title tag in anchor tags?

does they help in SE ranking.

[Navdeep]

hi all,
i have seen some SEOs using title tag inside the anchor tag. is this worth doing and how it effects the ranking of the page.

for example
<A href="www.webmasterworld.com/recentposts.htm" title="online discussion forum">recent post</A>

is it as effective as the alt tags.

any ideas please.

thanks
Navdeep s

[pageoneresults]

Hello Navdeep, here is a recent discussion on the title attribute...

Link title attributes. Do they help optimization? [webmasterworld.com]

[corz]

however, that thread is too old to post in, we should continue it here..

I find the suggestion that using ALT tags is tantamount to seo suicide, completely sickening. ALT tags are a required attribute of the image tag, as specified by W3 standards, and absolutly crucial to text-only browsers and the visually impaired...

"To avoid problems with text-only UAs as well as to make image content understandable and navigable to users of non-visual UAs, you need to provide a description with ALT, and avoid server-side image maps"
- from [w3.org...]

folks following the above link needed to see that.

sticking with the hypothetical screen-reader example on that page, exactly what text would that text-reader be reading for images? how will it describe them to a blind user? shocking!

If what was said then is true, my gut response is.. "Search Engines of the World.. Wise the <edit>foo</edit> up!".

I'm not blind, thank god, but if I was I'd be real pissed at that "Top 10", and even more pissed at the search engines which failed me.

As for title tags, I love 'em! and use them absolutely wherever I can, mainly because they equate to "pop-up titles" on most modern browsers.

;o)
(or

[edited by: pageoneresults at 4:27 am (utc) on June 11, 2004]

[madmatt69]

I know AltaVista not too long ago used to show the information I put in the title attribute on some of my pages, so I'm sure some engines rank it. Again, what does it hurt? Pop in some good useful title info, and at the least it's useful for your users, and maybe give a bit of a boost in some SE's.