A much talked about topic is the world of SEO: “Do Alt and Title attributes help with SEO?” Well, to help shed some light on this topic, I did some research and came up with some good conclusions. I’m not suggesting that these are 100% accurate, but from my initial research they appear to be correct. I welcome all other SEO experts to share their thoughts on this topic by posting their comments, because as we all know, every little piece of information can help us all.
Well, for starters, I want to provide a short introduction to each attribute to help you understand its “intended” purpose.
The alt attribute is popularly and incorrectly known as an alt tag and is often misinterpreted to provide a tooltip for an image. Both are wrong. First of all, the alt attribute is an attribute and not a tag. The alt attribute was always intended to provide alternative information about an item and is generally required for images and image maps and is not intended to be used to display tooltips. The alt attribute can be used for the img, area, and input elements to help provide alternate information to users who cannot display that element in their browser. As an example, this is how you would define an alt attribute for an image: 
. If the image is not displayed, the text, “this is our company logo” will be displayed in the place of the image.
The title attribute, on the other hand, is intended to provide additional information about an element, which is displayed as a tooltip in most graphical browsers. The title attribute can be used to describe any HTML element except base, base font, header, html, meta, parameter, script, and title.
An excellent use of the title attribute is to provide descriptive text within an anchor tag so that users know where the link will take them if they click on it. When the user hovers the mouse over the link, a small tooltip will be displayed showing the title text they provided. An example would be
So, as you can see, the alt and title attributes serve different purposes, but how do they affect SEO? This is the real question that we all want to know and understand. Do they help with SEO or are they just ignored by search engines? I tried several different scenarios, all on Google, and after my research I came to the following conclusions.
Alternate attributes appear to be picked up by Google, whether or not there is a link within that element. Some SEO experts have mentioned that if there is no link then the alt attribute would not be indexed … from my research I have found this to be false.
Going further, I noticed in a test scenario, if there was an image with an alt attribute and a link to a completely different site, that other site was also indexed by Google by searching for the text within the alt attribute. It was difficult for me to verify this multiple times, but I definitely did verify it in a test scenario.
I also went one step further and analyzed my results with what Google Images was showing. I immediately realized that Google sometimes takes the text from the alt attribute and provides this text as the description of the image in Google Images, something that is very valuable to know and understand when doing SEO for your website.
In all my test scenarios, the title attribute doesn’t seem to be picked up by Google and adding a link to that element didn’t seem to affect this result at all. If you really think about it, this makes perfect sense. Since you can place title attributes on almost every element of a website, it would be very easy for a user to affect search engines by stuffing keywords into their web pages, something that Google and the other major players do not want. Hence why title attributes don’t help with SEO.
In my opinion, you should use the title attribute to help with your user experience and not SEO. Since the tool tips provide more useful information to the user about images, links, fields and much more, it will help your users to understand what is happening on the web page.
So from my testing I have determined that a title attribute is meant to provide tooltips to the user for user experience, while the alt attribute is useful in terms of providing alternate information to the user when their browser cannot. display an image or post. element and helping to increase the SEO of a website. My recommendation is that you pay close attention to when, where and how you are using your alt attributes. If they help with SEO, then you need to pay close attention to what you are adding.
When adding images, always make sure to add an alt attribute to the code for each image. If you don’t have one, specify a blank one, such as alt = “”. Also, make sure to add alt text that is relevant to that image, the content on that page, and make sure you don’t specify an alt attribute of more than 100 characters, as this can be perceived as spam.
Hope you find my short overview on the topic “Do Alt and Title Attributes Help With SEO?” to be beneficial to you and your business. I’m sure one could dig deeper into this topic, spending weeks determining the differences between how Google, Yahoo! and the other major search engines handle title and alt attributes with regard to SEO for a website.
I welcome all comments and / or comments.
