I use the title attribute myself and believe it has some value as an additional link description:

<a href="keyword-page.html" title="Descriptive keyword phrase">Keyword</a>

would you say the same for Images?

i personally use the ALT tag only and not the title however, I noticed a few websites which appear top in the SERP's use both.

2 reasons to ALWAYS use title atributes in links:

1) a chance to double your keyword
2) Helps screen readers (audio) browsers

would you say the same for Images?
i personally use the ALT tag only and not the title however, I noticed a few websites which appear top in the SERP's use both.

The alt attribute is ment to be a short description of the purpose/content of an image, if the image somehow should become unavailable.

I haven't used title attributes on images, myself. But I don't see any reason why the title attribute shouldn't be used on images as well as in links.

The last tests I ran, I didn't see any evidence of the title attribute being used for ranking purposes.

That test was about 6-8 months ago, so things obviously could have changed since then.

However, as pointed out, even if they don't help with rankings, they do help with accessibility.

[edited by: Philosopher at 5:41 pm (utc) on Oct. 22, 2007]

As accessibility becomes more important, why not plan for the future? There may be some credit later in the life of your site. My research also indicates no impact from changes specific to ALT and TITLE tags at this moment in time.

At the New Orleans PubCon in 2005, Google engineers confirmed that they did not use the title attribute in the algorithm. They told me that it appeared too rarely on web pages to be a useful relevance signal. I had been testing for it up to that time, and had come to that conclusion anyway, but asked the question for confirmation.

I've tested a couple times since then and still see no evidence that the title attribute matters for SEO. But it certainly can help the end user - especially when the linked text (or image) does not tell the full story about the link destination - as it often doesn't in some contemporary blogging styles.

Yeah, I remember that from NO. Things like Target getting sued [webmasterworld.com] always make me watch it for a while afterwards.

I have used the alt attribute to target misspellings and have noticed they can hold great weight depending on how competitve the phrase/word is.

creative craig: so you dont use the ALT tag to describe an image (i.e. my websites logo).
from what I understand you use several keywords (i.e. keyword, key word, key werd) to get search engine traffic. im wondering if combining both methods would be a better choice (i.e. my website logo, logos, logoes)...

If you were to use the title attribute in a linked <img> element, the value you use would describe the image and not the link's target. Description of the hyperlink's target would belong in the <a title=""> area. It's a semantic difference, and an essential one, IMO.

<img> - title attribute's value describes the image
<a> - title attribute's value describes the link's destination

I have a few sites that I use for testing only.