ALT vs. TITLE for images
 

Running a thumbnailed TGP has it's pitfalls, particularly with the rising popularity of Modzilla-based browsers...

Currently I am displaying all thumbnail links with the description in the ALT tag; great fodder for search engines, and every IE surfer gets a description of the link before he/she clicks it (unless they're being impatient).

BUT: Modzilla doesn't display ALT text on mouseover - it displays a TITLE text on mouseover...

To make the pages more Modzilla friendly I'd like to take the ALT text out and put the description into the TITLE tag instead - - - bad idea se wise?
I can't put the description into both, because as it stands the main page is just over 100k, the cut-off point for spiders to read it. It'll inflate the page by probably another 20k.

Will search engines give the TITLE tag similar weight as the ALT?

I'm far from an SEO expert, but I always thought that it was a good idea to mix it up by including ALT or TITLE tags somewhat randomly.

I'm sure some other folks will weigh in.

First - lets dispell a little confusion:

a title tag is what you use in the head of the html page to describe the page

a title attribute is what you would use on a href link as a tooltip to describe where the link is taking you

an alt attribute is used for accesibility reasons to describe what an image is for visually impaired or for browsers that dont display images well

OK thats the original uses of those elements

As far as SE's go - no one has ever proved to me whether an image using a title attribute is any help or hindrence - however - it is very possible to prove that using an image alt attribute does help - as a matter of fact Ive done it myself with two test sites and img alt attributes definitely help if written concisely and to the point without looking like spam - although there is a 100 character limit to the alt text originally - the SEs seem to think that anything over about 4 words is pretty much overdoing it

a proper way to use both attributes would be:


Hope that helps and of course this is just my opinion based on a lot of testing and previous experiences - others may have different results :)

Damn that is good one.. thanks Linkster
Why simplest solutions are always hardest to find out |banghead|

Agreed :)


Linkster also gave you BIG hint about what to do with your pages...

USE the "bits" of a page as they are meant to be used.

Title tag should be a title.
Description should be a description.
Alt tags should describe the image that it is replacing.
Title attrib should be the title of the recieving page.
etc...
etc...


Same for all the other bits...

DD

Would it be spammish if you used identical wording in both the alt tag of a thumb and the title attribute of the link leading to its fullsize counterpart?
Ex:


Or should one try to vary the two a bit?

Useless..

so yes you can... but don't over do it...

DD

DD, does this help? Or is it spammish?
Ex:
[/B

I set my links up kind of like that on Tijuana-Whores back in May of last year (notice lack of title tags Argh)

src="brothels/tn_tijuana-brothels.jpg " width=76 border=8>


It doesn't seem to have hurt, I've got top ten listings on most of the terms I was after

|thumb Thanks, linkster, that was a very good and down to the point explanation...
Despite the fact that I mixed up deffinitions (tag - attribute) I actually know how to use them correctly -
which brings me back to the question:
yes - I know that the alt helps with SEs, as mentioned above, just that it leaves Modzilla browsers in the 'blank' so to speak...

what's about replacing all ALTs with TITLEs in regard of Search engines?

I think the alt attrib. is best left to images, and the title atrtib. is best left to links. Simple is good :)

Also, consider that adding more attributes adds to the weight of the HTML portion of the page.. making the "real" visible content of the page a smaller percentage, which *probably* isn't a good thing, all else being equal.

I'm no expert, just considered opinion.

I guess what I was trying to get across is that I've never seen any benefit from using title attributes on an image, wheras I have with the alt attribute and I can't find anyone that has.
The other thing to consider is that attributes that are mis-used are sometimes coded into algos as a spam prevention measure - I dont have any proof either way with regards to the title attribute on images, but I do know that the title attribute works great with links and that the alt attribute works great with images :)

I would have to think that with people trying both roads for many years that if a title attrib on an image helped they would be shown in Googles rankings but I have never seen it show up.

Again - my opinion - is to stick to the proper uses of attributes and tags when it comes to the SEs since they base so much on the W3 standards

Hmm I was wondering why I see those New Title/alt tags

Tommy :) as you know - there are about 100 little things that affect the rankings of a page in the SE's - this is one of those things that seems like an easy way to improve that rank - but as usual - nothing is as easy as it seems.
For the original question on Mozilla browsers - seems the TGP software could be written to include a little description "on mouseover" like many of them do.

I know that! BUT: I'd really like to keep one or the other, ALT or TITLE, for obvious se reasons...
Of course I could write the code with an additional 'mouseover' procedure, but they are so character heavy that it would add too much extra code to the page (I assume ~100bytes per link!). That would mean I'd have to drop probably 60-80 links from my daily list in order to stay around the 100k cut-off for se-spiders = that's a huge trade off for the minority of Modzilla users! [Currently my pages are already 106 and 116 kb respectively, a little above the cut-off, but the bottom is mostly unimportant stuff not helping any ranking.]

Catch 22? |dizzy|

George - I really thing you need to stop thinking about that cutoff - Im very serious when I say I can prove that links up around the 240k page size do get counted - we've tested this many times over the last 5 years and it still holds true. Its a good "recommendation" from Google to hold them around 100k and I know their cache only shows 101k(for server load) but based on Yahoo and DMOZ links, I dont think anyone suffers with links that exist down in the 200k region :)
I know I have great linkbacks from GG, Tommy, Jay and loads others that are on pages way larger than 200k

|thumb I honestly did not know that!
I was constantly worried about it due to my pages showing only as 101k on Google and Yahoo - so I figured that's as much as the spider actually spiders... CHEERS!