An investigation was carried out using 13 alfalfa accessions during 2009 to 2010 and was located on the experimental field of East Azarbaijan Agriculture and Natural Resources Research Center (AZARAN), Iran. The objective of this research was to evaluate positive effect and reliability of yield and quality traits as selection criteria in alfalfa breeding. Significant differences were observed for most of the yield and quality components. Variability coefficients were high for yield components, while quality traits showed relatively low variation. Plant height (PH), number of stems (NS), number of nodes (NN) and leaf size (LS) was positively correlated with plant yield. Crude protein (CP) content was correlated directly with acid detergent fiber (ADF) and natural detergent fiber (NDF) while correlation with crude fiber (CF) was inverse. The direct effect of the number of stems on yield had the highest value (0.698, P