MaaMaw. & The Tim - Consider this SEO theory of mine.

Maw, if you find out that Google does not penalize for tool tips, then use them (however, realize that if they are Java Script then Google cannot read them anyway so that essentially it is a waste of content to put that content in a tool tip becasue Google cannot read the content in the tool tips). Other than finding folks who are using "black hat" techniques, Google could care less about your ON site SEO. ON site SEO is too easy to optimize for, for the most part, at least when compared to OFF site SEO. Anyone with a terrible, useless site can get a grasp on ON site SEO.

But what Google REALLY looks at is OFF site SEO, which is harder to do because it requires time and perserverence and most importantly a good, useful site (all thihngs that lazy people and spammers do not have). IOW, OFF site SEO is much harder to master and therefore if you can get a lot of OFF site SEO under your belt then that means that you are most likely working hard and therefore your site must be worth looking at and spending time with, according to the googlebot. That's how Google thinks in a nutshell.

It's significantly harder to get folks to link to your site with the proper anchor text than it is to rearrange your site so that the content is optimized for search engines like Google. Anyone can rearrange their site, even spammers. But not just anyone can get folks to link to their site, especially without wanting youto recirocate the link. People will only link to you if they find your site valuable to their own visitors. But even if your site is valuable, you have to work hard to get folks to actually link to you. And reciprical linking will not do. Google puts much more value on a link to you that is not reciprocated. Again, it is easier to get a recip link than it is to get a one-way link. And that's why recip links do not hold much weight anymore. It's jsut too damn easy to get a recip link than it is to get a one-way link.

How do I know that OFF site SEO is more importnat than ON site SEO?
Consider this.

As I'm sure you all know by now, if you go to Google and search for MISERABLE FAILURE, the #1 result that has been there for years and years is the bio page for GW Bush on the whitehouse.gov website. Now, if you do a quick search on GWs whitehouse bio page for the phrase MISERABLE FAILURE using your browser's find function (CTRL+F), you aren't going to find that phrase anywhere on the page (or even the site for that matter), of course (because that is childish and only Bush bashers would refer to him as that, but let's not get political here, right!?)

But the reason George Bush's Whitehouse.gov bio page shows up #1 in Google for that childish keyword, irrelevant keyword phrase is becasue of OFF site SEO and nothing else. You see, there are SO MANY sites that link to that page using the term MISERABLE FAILURE as the anchor text on the inbound text link to that GW bio page that Googlebot believes that that page is the most relevant page on the net in regards to the keyword phrase MISERABLE FAILURE. This is proof positive that Google puts a MAJOR priority on OFF page SEO over ON page SEO because the page does not even include the keyword phrase anywhere at all. No ton the page, not in the meta tags, not in the title tags. NOWHERE AT ALL.

This was opbviously a concerted effort on the part of the childish Bush bashers but it was a smart one, I suppose. One-way inbound links are MUCH more valuable to Google than reciprical links will ever be at this point. They knew that the whitehouse was not going to reciprocate their inbound links with outbound links to their own sites, so that means that every inbound link to that page was going to be worth its weight in gold, and sure enough, they were right. To call GW (or any president) a MISERABLE FAILURE is not only childish but it is a mere opinion. This does not matter to Google because Google is essentially a robot who could care less about what is true and what is mere opinion. On the other hand, if Google really cared about its search results it would have humans checking the results and dropping sites that are not useful when taking the keyword into consideration (or maybe they do have human searchers looking for bad searhc results but since maybe they too hate GW, they feel it is OK to keep that search result #1 for as long as GW is in office. But that is another debate/story for another time and another place). Actually, I already know that Google hires college students all over the world to search for bad search results and report them to Google. This info was leaked in an MS Word document by a Google employeee(which you can find on the net if you know where to look), who is suffering legal reprocussions for disclosing said info. But, again, I digress.

Bottom line. OFF site SEO is really all you need to get top spots in Google. But that's easier said than done for the average joe. If you are successful at it, you could literally have a site about dogs but be ranked high for the phrase AUTOMOBILE TIRES even though the text on your site has nothing to do with AUTOMOBILE TIRES and doesn't even mention the word at all. ON site SEO is essentially worthless at this point. You can spend your whole life with ON site SEO optimizing your pages for certain words and never get listed for them in Google because Google could care less about what you say. They only really care what others are saying about you.

Something to consider when searching for a grain of sanity in the utterly insane world of SEO, especially Google SEO.

============================================

That said, I'd like to interject a politically motivated question here.

I wonder why "The Tim" loves Google so much? Hmmmmmmm?