Alt Tag Vs. Link Title Attribute: Which Is More Important?

[Jason]

One of the best blog posts I’ve seen in a long time addressing anchor text links and alt tags is on Aaron Wall’s SEO Book. Quite frankly, I don’t like Aaron’s new tagline. It doesn’t really say much. The “Rank” and “Dominate” are clear enough. It’s the “Learn” part that really bothers me. But it’s his tagline. I think the blog post has a lot to offer and because it’s Aaron Wall, I’m willing to give him the benefit of a doubt:

One of my hobby sites has a fairly flat file structure, and some of the internal pages are somewhat linkworthy. The site was not marketed aggressively and the only sitewide link to the homepage was the logo, which I forgot to put an image alt tag on. Google ranked 2 pages on the site well for the core keyword, but neither of those pages were the homepage. I noticed the lacking image alt tag, fixed it, and within a week my homepage was outranking the other pages.

According to SEOmoz’s Search Engine Ranking factors, alt tags rank moderately high in importance for ranking factors. I agree with that since search engines don’t crawl images. The alt tag is almost the only clue search engines have for ranking images. They do look at surrounding text on the page and page quality factors, etc. But what is missing in the study is the importance of the link title attribute. I went looking for it and couldn’t find it.

That said, I do believe that the title attribute is of some importance, though probably not as important as the image alt tag. An image hot linked to a website with a strong alt tag will likely draw much more mojo than the the title attribute on an anchor text link. However, I don’t see how the hot linked image, no matter how strong the alt tag is, can even come close to strong anchor text, with or without the title attribute. I think the reason the title attribute isn’t as important as the anchor text itself is because the anchor text is so important that the title attribute pales in comparison. Still, I would include the title attribute in every link possible.

According to the same SEOmoz study, bold text with keyword usage is only slightly less important than the alt tag. I disagree with this somewhat. When it comes to search engine optimization, I think bold and italics indicates importance to the page content writer, but that doesn’t always equate to search engine importance, although it may. It depends on the other on-page qualities. Nevertheless, if we use the .3 difference between alt tag importance and bold text importance as a benchmark, I think the difference in importance between alt tags and title attributes is only slightly more than that - maybe a .5 or .6. What that says to me is that, given two web pages that are equivalent in all factors except that one uses an image alt tag with a missing title attribute on the page and the other includes a title attribute but misses the image alt tag then the page that has the alt tag is going to win out, only by a nudge. I don’t know if Aaron would agree with that, but it makes sense to me.

Nick Stamoulis