Alt text

Alt text serves two audiences at once: screen-reader users who can't see the image, and crawlers that can't reliably interpret pixels. Describe what the image actually shows rather than stuffing keywords — "barista pouring latte art" beats "coffee coffee shop best coffee." Decorative images that add no meaning should get an empty alt attribute (alt="") so screen readers skip them, and every alt-bearing image is also a candidate for Google Images traffic.