What's the expert consensus on alt vs title on an image? Alt or Title or both? Also, any opinions on using title tag in links? Thanks,
Both. It satisfies the image description needs for all browsers. Don't worry about the SEO end...just worry about the user end. The title tag doesn't seem to do very much from an SEO point of view, but it can't hurt anything.
I usually end up just using Alt depending on where the images are on the page, and whether or not the image is a link. I have tried both Alt and Title, and did not see any noticeable difference with SE's or ranking. I use Alt rather for handicapped users who may view my pages and need the Alt function to read images. It helps with SEO to use some of your keywords in your Alt tags, but if you built your site SE friendly to begin with you would already have them there (hopefully). The main thing I notice about Alt and Title tags is when people go 'overboard' and add in several sentences, phrases, or stuff keywords into ALL of them. It looks less than professional if you cannot finish reading the Alt description before it disappears after mouse hover!
I've noticed in IE that it shows the alt when you rolloever an image. Firefox does not. Firefox does, however, show the title tag. I don't mind doing both; I was just concerned that having both an alt and a title with the same keywords could be seen as spamming.
You shouldn't have to worry about that, just don't over do it and try using different words in different orders in both the Alt and Title for the same image if you use both.
No browser should display alt attributes as tooltips, so IE are confusing matters by doing this. The alt attribute is for display when images haven't been downloaded, or used by screen readers.