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Re: Title attribute in link

"Roy Schestowitz" <newsgroups@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message 
news:dtvjf9$284t$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> __/ [ John ] on Monday 27 February 2006 19:12 \__
>
>> Hi,
>>
>> I have a title attribute in my links (css navbar for articles) and I was
>> wondering what everyone thought about it from an SEO perspective.
>>
>> ex.
>> <a title="Planning Affordable Wedding Receptions - Tips on how to Plan
>> Affordable Wedding Receptions, including information on Location,
>> Decorations, Food, Drinks and the Wedding Cake.."
>> href="../wed-info/wedding-receptions.htm">
>>         Wedding Receptions</a></li>
>>
>> http://www.your-new-jersey-wedding.com/index.htm
>> (top left navbar)
>
>
> ...You of course realise that tooltip balloons are often the intent of 
> such
> texts, as well as the ability to help the disabled reader. What would be 
> the
> benefit of such keyword stuffing? Does it truly help human readers? Does 
> it
> only devour bandwidth? Surely it can have a positive impact on the page
> being pointed at, although not an impact that is comparable with the 
> anchor
> text, namely "Wedding Receptions".

It wasn't intended to be keyword stuffing but a way to provide the complete 
title of the article without "line wrap" in the navbar.  I added the article 
description at a later time.  The title attribute was a bit of an accident. 
I copied and changed the css from a free template that the title attribute 
was a part of.

>
> This technique of yours reminds me of alt tag misuse, which verges being 
> spam
> (a loose use of the term). If you think about the purpose of the mandatory
> alt tag, you soon realise (much as in the case above) that, under certain
> conditions (devices, reader type), it is equally distracting as hidden 
> text
> in the page. Always ask yourself if the human visitor benefits. If not, be
> alert.

My initial intention was directed toward the human visitor.  If I provide 
more information, on a page they already have loaded, about a link they 
might click on, they might find the site more useful and use it more often. 
I only thought of the SEO implications of this practice afterwards and 
wanted to make sure I wasn't hurting my SERP's and what was the best way to 
help my SERP's.

>
>
>> I try to keep the value of the title attribute the same as the page
>> description of the page it links to.
>
>
> I tend to do that too (I use nicetitled.css for enhanced popups), but I
> abbreviate when it exceeds about 7 words.

I'll take a look at nicetitled.css (assuming it's a utility program).  As it 
stands, MSIE shows the entire value of the title attribute and Fire Fox 
truncates it to x characters.  I'm either missing your point about the 
shorter description or we just see it from two different perspectives.

>
>
>> Thanks,
>> John
>
>
> I hope my tone was not misinterpreted in the above answers. *smile*

I'm looking for help and answers and I appreciate the time you take to 
provide it.  Your view of what I'm doing was unexpected and it makes me look 
at it from a different perspective.  I think I'm doing the right thing from 
the user's point of view.  I don't think they would view it as keyword 
spamming but I hope they don't find it distracting.

>
> Best wishes and good luck,
>
> Roy
>
> PS - Try to make the description in title="" somewhat different from the
> targetted page. This could saturate its keywords and lead to breadth 
> rather
> than focus.

The description tag from the article page is more of a summary of the 
article, not taken directly from the article.  The title attribute includes 
the description preceded by the article title, which is also the article 
page title.  It is different from the page content but it re-enforces the 
page's description tag.  I think this makes sense from the human perspective 
and I think it agrees with your suggestion but I wouldn't want to change it 
unless it is hurting my SERP's.

>
> -- 
> Roy S. Schestowitz      |    "Spam enchanted evening..."
> http://Schestowitz.com  |    SuSE Linux     |     PGP-Key: 0x74572E8E
>  7:10pm  up  15:21,  11 users,  load average: 0.35, 0.53, 0.47
>      http://iuron.com - next generation of search paradigms 



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