I have been playing around with the idea mentioned below and in this link.  I don't have enough time with it yet to see if it helps, but I can't imagine that it hurts.  I have also tried to totally eradicate any empty or non-existent alt tags from my pages.  Every little bit helps in search engine promotion.

WebProWorld :: Anchor Text Tips: "A senior Google engineer told me the other day that placing title tags inside the href tag will improve optimization. I am slowly integrating and it is helping a little with terms that were floating on second pages moving them up slightly."