"Title" is always great to use just to help your visitors. I usually put some expanded info about where a link will be taking them, it's kind of like a courtesy.
The title= attribute is what shows for the hover text when you hover your mouse over the link... The title= attribute is NOT considered the link text... It does absolutely zero for SEO. So to answer your question, BOTH of the following links are equal from an SEO perspective: It is the Link Text between the opening <a> tag and the closing </a> tag for the anchor element that matters from an SEO perspective. The only difference in the above two links is that one has hover text (one with title=) and the other does not. When you are using image links, the alt= attribute of the <img> element is considered the Link Text for the link since the <img> replaces the link text... Again the title= attribute does nothing from an SEO perspective, but is typically displayed by browsers for hover text if it exists. If there is no title= attribute but there is an alt= attribute then the alt= value is often displayed by browsers as the hover text.