A very talked about topic in the SEO world is: “Do Alt and Title attributes help with SEO?” Well, to help shed some light on this topic, I did some research and came to some good conclusions. I’m not suggesting these are 100% accurate, but based on my initial research they seem to hit the mark. I welcome all other SEO experts to share your thoughts on this topic by posting your comments, because as we all know, every little piece of information can help us all.

Well, to start off, I want to give a brief 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 commonly misinterpreted to provide tooltips 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 alternate information about an element and is generally required for images and imagemaps and is not designed to display tooltips. The alt attribute can be used for the img, area, and input elements to help provide alternative 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 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, basefont, head, html, meta, param, script, and title.

A great use for the title attribute is to provide descriptive text within an anchor tag so users know where the link will take them if they click it. When the user hovers their mouse over the link, a small tooltip will be displayed displaying the title text you’ve provided. an example would be

So, as you can see, the alt and title attributes have 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.

Alt 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… based on my research, I found this to be false.

Going further, I realized 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 several times, but I definitely verified it in a test scenario.

I also went a step further and analyzed my results with what Google Images showed. I immediately noticed that Google sometimes takes the text from the alt attribute and provides this text as the image description 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 doesn’t seem to affect this result at all. If you really think about it, this makes a lot of 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 don’t want. , so the 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 tooltips 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 the user experience, while the alt attribute is useful in terms of providing alternative information to the user when their browser cannot. displaying an image or input 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 each image’s code. If you don’t have one, just specify a blank one, like alt=””. Also, be 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 that is more than 100 characters in length, as this can be perceived as spam.

I 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 into this topic, spending weeks figuring out the differences between how Google, Yahoo! and the other major search engines handle the title and alt attributes with respect to SEO for a website.

I welcome all feedback and/or comments.