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Title Attribute in Links Plays a Role in SEO?

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Currently, there has been numerous debates about the different factors affecting SEO and one of them is the relevance of a title attribute to links for SEO. For the benefit of those who are not sure what I'm talking about this is an example (*note the title part):

<a href="http://…." title="….">

Is it really worth spending more time to add them to your article, especially one with lotsa links?

I've read a few articles and it seems that there are 2 distinct camps on this, which I shall call the optimist and the pessimist. Here I'll attempt to summarise the primary lines of thoughts so that you can decide for youself if it's suitable:

The Optimist:

  • Provides developers another place to effectively insert targeted keywords and descriptive text helping to increase the value of their document.
  • It's there for the blind, where text to speech browsers read them aloud, so that people who cannot see can still know what the page being linked to is about.
  • Increases usability and accessibility to your site and does no harm.

    • The Pessimist:

  • Believes that search engines only uses it in consideration to the page being linked to and not the page the link is on.
  • If SEOs were to find out that they can be used to boost rankings, those who already use them may just make some changes to the way we use them.
  • There are well over 100 variables used by Google, smaller systems use more than 100 already, and they have less data to sort so nothing is constant as everything continuously readjusts itself everytime the environment changes.


    • Personally, I believe that if it increases the accessibility of your website - why not; but I believe it'll be hard to constantly remember to add it to your article as it can be quite tedious. So are there any solutions out there to solve this?

    The answer's yes but currently I've only found a solution for Wordpress users, so if any of the readers found another method of doing it easily, please update me as well =)

    So for Wordpress users, there's a plugin called Title Grabber by Nick of Preow which automatically takes what’s in between the title tags on the linked page and adds it to the link attribute everytime you save an article. I've tried it and it works great although it adds a few moments to the saving time of your article. Nonetheless, a very good plugin which reduces your workload and helps improve the accessibility of your site.

    This entry was posted on Monday, June 19th, 2006 at 6:29 am and is filed under Wordpress, SEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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    9 Responses to “Title Attribute in Links Plays a Role in SEO?”

    1. Nick
      June 22nd, 2006 17:08
      1

      I'm glad someone is using it.

      I've tried to slim down the time it takes to complete all the operations, and I think it's at it's fastest.

      Let me know if anything breaks. :)

    2. teckie
      June 22nd, 2006 17:39
      2

      yup, sure thing =)

    3. Thomas
      June 23rd, 2006 23:14
      3

      Thanks for the link to the plugin. I'm going to add it to all the blogs I work with.

    4. vijaya
      November 9th, 2006 16:15
      4

      This is the first time, I visited this site. I found the above article so informative.

      Thanks,
      Vijaya

    5. seo consultant
      April 25th, 2007 04:28
      5

      I am in the "second camp" I dont believe the title attribute to make any difference to seo. The anchor text is the thing paople need to think about when creating links.

    6. gedas
      May 25th, 2007 08:34
      6

      great post but plugin link doesnt work:(

    7. teckie
      June 1st, 2007 09:26
      7

      I'll just put it up here for the moment, while Nick gets his site online:

      http://seo.blorc.com/titlegrabber.zip

    8. Andrew
      July 4th, 2007 21:11
      8

      Good post. I recommend sticking to good anchor text, works the best.

    9. seo consultant
      July 29th, 2007 02:47
      9

      Ok- i agree that this plays a role for accesability, so i have added the plugin to my blog. Its good, works a treat, though like you said takes a little longer than normal, but, yeah, nice one!

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