What is a link title?
A link title is the text inside the title attribute of an anchor tag. Hover over a link that has one and a small tooltip appears with a few extra words about where the link goes. It is separate from the anchor text (the words you can see and click) and separate from the page title at the other end. The browser reads it, some screen readers read it, and search engines mostly ignore it.
It is one of the oldest, smallest pieces of HTML on a page, and one of the most misunderstood. The attribute was designed as advisory information: a hint, not a label. The anchor text does the work of telling a reader what a link is. The title is there to add a detail that would clutter the sentence, such as the format of a file, the language of the destination page or a warning that the link opens a PDF.
Why it matters
Why a link title matters
On its own, a link title moves nothing in search. Google has been clear that it does not use the title attribute as a ranking signal, and in our experience the tests bear that out. Where it earns its place is in the reading experience. A well written title answers the small question a reader has before they click: how long is this, where does it go, is it worth leaving the page for. That small courtesy keeps people on a site longer and sends them to the next page with the right expectation.
It matters in the other direction too. A link title that repeats the anchor text is noise, and a link title stuffed with keywords is a tell that a site is trying too hard. Assistive technology can read both the anchor text and the title, so a redundant title makes a page more tedious to navigate for exactly the people it was meant to help.
In practice
How a link title works in practice
- 01
The attribute goes inside the anchor: the href, then the title, then the visible text. Most content management systems expose it as a field in the link dialog, usually labeled title or advisory text, which is why so many pages have the anchor text copied into it by default. The useful version is short, specific and different from the words on the page. A link to a forty page brand book might carry the title "PDF, 12 MB". A link to a glossary page might carry a one line definition. A link to an external site might name the publication.
- 02
Two caveats. Tooltips do not exist on touch screens, so most of your audience will never see the title, which is why it must never carry information the page needs. And the title is not a substitute for descriptive anchor text: "click here" with a helpful title is still "click here" to a search engine and to anyone scanning the page.
- 03
A sensible rule for a content team is to decide once, in the style guide, when titles are used and what they say. Downloads get the file type and size. External links get the name of the destination. Everything else gets nothing. That way the attribute stays meaningful on the few links that carry it, instead of becoming one more field that editors fill in because it is there.
- 04
Existing sites need an audit before the rule can hold. A crawler exports every link with its title attribute, and the list sorts into titles that repeat the anchor text, titles that carry a keyword string and titles that say something useful. The first two are stripped in bulk, usually by a developer in the template rather than by an editor link by link, since most were generated by the system. Then check the result with a screen reader, not only a mouse.
Watch out
What people get wrong about link titles
The biggest mistake is treating the title as an SEO lever. Pages do not rank better because their links have titles, and a site that fills every title with target keywords has spent effort on nothing and made its code look like spam. The second mistake is relying on the title for accessibility. Screen reader behavior with the attribute is inconsistent, so anything a visually impaired user needs belongs in the anchor text or in the surrounding sentence, not in a tooltip.
The third is duplication. When the title repeats the anchor text, some assistive tools read the link twice. Either make the title say something new or leave it empty. Empty is a perfectly good choice. Many of the best written pages on the web have no title attributes at all, because the sentences around the links already do the job.
