Table Titles, Image Titles, html titles - How important are they?

[emeraldisle]

Hello Webpro Friends,

I have heard that alt tags have some importance as well as anchor links. Are they still as important as they used to be?

Also, what about table titles, image titles and the actual names of the files, are they important? For example have been naming my image files with keywords such as cleaning_logo.gif instead of just logo.gif. Also, my html files I have been giving titles such as cleaning_sponsors.html instead of just sponsors.html. Do the search engines "care" about this, or am I just wasting my time?

Thanks so much!
Emerald

[amxfan]

I have done a little bit of research on this and every page that I have come to, be it a forum, blog or SEO site, all state that your title attribute for text links has no SEO factor to it. I personally disagree with all of them. I use title attributes for my text links, and when I look at a text only cache page of mine on Google and Yahoo, the title tags have been indexed and still appear. This tells me that they play some part, but I have no idea to be honest of how much weight is actually put on them. Alt tags for images, Yahoo does put a little bit of weight on these to help determine page relevancy, but if you are only looking at putting the title attribute in just for SEO reasons, I'm not sure what type of payoff you are going to get. With that said, I would still put them in, not just for SEO reasons, but for accessibility reasons. Different user agents and audible readers use these tags. The title attribute should really be used for, as stated by W3C, "The title attribute may be set for both A and LINK to add information about the nature of a link. This information may be spoken by a user agent, rendered as a tool tip, cause a change in cursor image, etc."

Basically in short, Yahoo and Google do index them as one can see by viewing a cached page in text only, so that tells me that they do play a small part. How much, I do not know, but I feel you ought to use them, if for no other reason use them for accessibility.

[inertia]

Alt tags, link title tags, images names have little weight with the search engines but are still worth getting right.

Having keyword rich page names will have more effect and what you're doing so far is spot on. Research your keywords first then try and tailor page names to the best keywords you find.

All the aspects that you're asking about don't have big effects on search engines but they are definitely worth getting right.

[Webnauts]

Alt attributes are a ranking factor. And they are useful especially for Googles and other SE Images search.
Hyperlink title attributes are not a ranking factor, but still an alternative for users, browsing your site with browsers that do not support alt attributes.

I wrote a while an excellent tutorial about the use of alt attributes: Alt Attribute & Search Engine Optimization

Good luck.

[Peter (IMC)]

Hello Webpro Friends,

I have heard that alt tags have some importance as well as anchor links. Are they still as important as they used to be?

Also, what about table titles, image titles and the actual names of the files, are they important? For example have been naming my image files with keywords such as cleaning_logo.gif instead of just logo.gif. Also, my html files I have been giving titles such as cleaning_sponsors.html instead of just sponsors.html. Do the search engines "care" about this, or am I just wasting my time?

Thanks so much!
Emerald

Alt atributes in images that are links are very important as they serve as the anchor text of the link. Not sure what you mean with anchor links, but I'll assume you mean the anchor text of a link. Very important as well. The title atribute I never use for SEO purposes.

As to file names. Don't use _ but in stead -

so your cleaning_sponsors.html should be cleaning-sponsors.html

_ is a character to Google, while - is interpreted as a space, thus making it possible to recognize individual words.

[edhan]

I do believe that it is quite important in long term for SEO. Many do not see the benefit in short term as it may not be shown. But I always do it for a long term result. As long as you do it correctly for SEO, then you will be able to see result slowly. I always follow the basic rule that is do what you want for visitors and not for search engines.