The benefits of using Title Text on links and text.
Part of this topic is covered in my post Why does alt-text not show up in Firefox? which deals mainly with images, but the subject deserves it’s own post as using titles on links will help robots give links (and text) a higher priority when it comes to ranking the content of your web page.
As explained in my other post on alt text which you should read first, alt text is for browsers that have images turned off or for people who use screen readers and gives a brief description of what the image is, whereas the title text is what is supposed to be displayed when you hover over an image (or word, or link, or whatever you want to title), supplying additional information.
The confusion between alt text and title text is that Internet Explorer displays ‘Alt Text’ when hovering over an image, and all the good browsers (like Firefox, Chrome and Safari) don’t. Instead, the good browsers only display ‘Title Text’ over images.
How to ‘title text’ your links and text.
Try hovering over this link: www.worcestershirewebdesign.co.uk.
Now try hovering over this word: here.
The code for putting title text over a link is:
<a href=“http://www.worcestershirewebdesign.co.uk” target=“_blank” title=”Using title text over links“> www.worcestershirewebdesign.co.uk </a>
and the code for putting title text over normal text is either:
<p title=”Using title text on words”>here</p>
or:
<span title=”Using title text on words”>here</span>
NB: the <p>…</p> tags will start a new paragraph, as they are paragraph tags, and the <span>…</span> tags will allow you to title-text a word within a sentence.
The code above is in xhtml but works fine in plain, old fashioned, boring html (and if you are still using html, WHY?)
And now the benefits of using title text on links.
Our internet friends, the robots, sometimes have a hard time working out what is relevant and what is not on your web page. They take a good look at the meta data for the Title, Description and Keywords, and most of your page ranking comes from those three, in that order. Then your tags H1, H2, H3 (and so on) come in to play and finally your content.
You may have heard the expression “Content is King“… well it is. After looking at your meta data, tags etc., it is the uniqueness and relevance of your content that makes search engines sit up and take notice.
The robots don’t actually understand what you write, they’re robots after all, and artificial intelligence is still sixteen years away, but what they can understand is what you do to your content to make it stand out. They know what BOLD is, they know what ITALICS are, and they sure know how to read TITLE TEXT.
All of these tell robots that “Hey!, This text or link is just a little bit more important than all the rest.”
Will using Title-Text on links make your website jump from a PageRank 0 to a PageRank 7 overnight? Not in your wildest dreams!
What it will do is get you in the habit of doing the right thing for your website. As with most other methods of Search Engine Optimisation (or Optimization as my spell checker keeps nagging me), any gains are strictly long-term. With the Millions of websites and Billions of web pages out there, any slight edge your website has over it’s nearest competitors could mean the difference between hitting page one or page two of Google for a particular search query… and that difference is huge.
So using title text and other SEO techniques now could pay dividends for the future.
A final word of caution – don’t overdo it.
Robots may not be intelligent, but they can spot someone abusing SEO techniques a million miles away.
Related information and links.
Why does alt-text not show up in Firefox?
I hope you found this information useful and I welcome your comments. If you have any specific questions related to website development, please email me or post a comment.
Worcestershire Web Designer
Website Design Help | Worcestershire Web Designer | May 6, 2009
alt, alt text, browser, chrome, Google, html, image, internet explorer, link, meta, PageRank, robots, safari, seo, tag, tags, title text, website, xhtml
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Your last tip on The benefits of using Title Text on links and text is: Don’t overdo it. How much link title text is too much? For example, I have a glossary of terms for the technical topic of my site (unpublished). In my links to the glossary, I insert brief preview text descriptions of my terms in the title field of the link(for the benefit of the reader, not for SEO). My title text will max out at 450 characters. Is that too much?
450 seems a lot, but keyword spamming is more to do with repetition than quantity, i.e. using the same high value keyword over and over again.
Imagine reading a paragraph with the words best web designer, best web designs, best web design repeated lots of times – it wouldn’t make good reading to a human and the Robots may consider that keyword spamming.
Hover over the bold text:
information regarding your comment
It’s a lot of information but it’s all relevant, so shouldn’t hurt.
Thank you very much for this tip, I really agree to the fact that the key in having a great text link is to carefully know the code.
I have started to use ad links on key words hoping it will increase my ranking. I don’t have lots of time for my site but moving up in rank would motivate me alittle…
Nice to see original content for once on a blog ! super
This is great! It really shows me where to expand my blog. I think that sometime in the future I might try to write a book to go along with my blog, but we will see…Good post with useful tips and ideas
I bookmarked this link. Thank you for good job!
I strongly recommend that you turn the No Follow off in your comment section. I’ll watch Google Webmaster Tools, and if the links don’t show up after a couple of weeks — I won’t go back to that blog again. Another suggestion: you should have a Top Commentator widget installed. Do Follow and Top Commentator will ensure that you have a successful blog with lots of readers!
After spending the last hour or so researching everything you said, I have to agree with you. Thanks for the advice.
[...] on this…I am very thankful for the very delightful posts from foolswisdom.com, worcestershirewebdesign.co.uk, http://www.winningtheweb.com – all of them 3 helped me forming my [...]
[...] on this…I am very thankful for the very delightful posts from foolswisdom.com, worcestershirewebdesign.co.uk, http://www.winningtheweb.com – all of them 3 helped me forming my [...]