There is a great amount of confusion regarding the use of the alt=”" and title=”" attributes in both web design and seo. I would like to help clarify their purpose in the web site and how they should be used.

The alt=”" attribute is defined by W3C Schools under the <img> tag as follows:

Required attributes
Purpose: text
Description: defines a short description of the image

The alt=”" attribute is for alternative text, it is required on all images for xhtml (any DTD) and also for accessibility. alt=”" provides a description of an image for speech browsers and browsers without graphics or users that don’t have images enabled in their browsers eg. alt=”Name of Company – logo”.

The title=”" attribute is defined by W3C Schools as follows:

Core Attributes: Not valid in base, head, html, meta, param, script, style, and title elements.
Purpose: tooltip_text
Description: A text to display in a tool tip

The title attribute should provide additional information and results in a tooltip to the website visitor eg. title=”Go to Home Page”. The title attribute can be applied to any HTML tag except: base, head, html, meta, param, script, style, and title; making it a very powerful way to provide mouse-over comments or additional information to your site visitors.

The alt and title attributes should NEVER be used within a website to stuff keywords. This doesn’t mean that a keyword won’t describe an image on the site or be used in a comment on a link, image, or form field but it is not the purpose.

Be honest, use the attributes the way they should be used and you won’t have issue. Put your keywords into your content where they should be.