The Title Tag

[bldstr]

Just how important is it?

Many SEO guides I shave come across fail to place any emphasis on it or fail to mention it altogether.

Should I be using it? In what way? On all elements?

I care about accessibility just as much as SEO.

EDIT: Maybe I should refer to it as the title attribute as it gets confused with the Meta/Head title tag...

EDIT 2: I see that the W3C site uses the title attribute for its main navigation, I guess that's confirmation enough that it should be used. It's not used in the secondary navigation though.

[etechdesigns]

Major search engines like Google, Yahoo, AOL, AltaVista, and AlltheWeb use your web page's Title Tag to evaluate its relevance. A carefully constructed Title Tag is very important for your page's ranking in the search engines. Since the Title Tag plays a vital role in determining your site's ranking in the SERPs, you need to pay a lot of attention to the words that appear in the Title Tag and the order in which they appear.

[felgall]

The title attribute is optional for all tags except images (where it is required to fix an IE bug).

It is used for attaching a tooltip to elements of your page. The corresponding tooltip will be displayed when the mouse is moved over an element that has a title attribute.

example:

<p>Have a nice <span title="opposite of night">day</span>.</p>


This will display an image tooltip in all browsers:

<img src="myimage.gif" alt="alternate description for when images are disabled"
title="this is the tooltip for the image">

setting title="" in images will stop a tooltip from displaying when you don't want one there. If you leave it out then IE will mistakenly display the alt text as a tooltip instead (the bug I referred to earlier).