Search Stock Photo for free in the Internet

It is quite a big task for any article writer to create a cartoon or an image by himself to enhance the quality of his/her article. He can make use of some his own snaps. However, here the option is too limited and most of the time, it is a problem to find out a matching photo aligned with the context of the article. So, the obvious choice is the internet. But hold on for a second. Though, it is possible to just right click and download most of the pictures from the internet, remember that most of the time, the rights of using those pictures are reserved by the lawful owner of the picture. You are not supposed to use these pictures commercially. In case, you are desirous to use these pictures, you need to take written permission from the owner of the picture. If you use any picture without the written consent of the owner, you may be subjected to copyright infringement law. So, let us see, how stock photo solve our requirements and what are the different ways, we can avail it for our blog.

To tackle the above situation, a group of people came forward and provided the platform, where you can purchase photo. It is often called stock photo. Stock photo refers to photo, which is licensed for specific usage. In most of the cases, these stock photos are lifetime loyalty free. What does it really mean? There are two kinds of rights that you can obtain, when you purchase a stock photo. The first one is called Royalty free agreement and the other one is called Rights Managed agreement. In the royalty free agreement, you can use the stock photo as many times as you want. In a rights managed copyright, you will be given copyright only for the project, for which you purchased the photo. So, if you purchased a stock photo for a particular website, you need to relicense the same photo to use it in another website. Both kinds of agreement can be split into exclusive and non-exclusive agreement. For exclusive copyright, no one else will be able to purchase and use the same stock photo. It is quite obvious that you need to pay off huge amount of money to get any exclusive right on the stock photo.

We have seen different types of copyright option. Now, we will see from where we can purchase these photos. There are quite a good number of websites, which sell stock photos. One of my favourite sites in this regard is fotolia. Here, you have stock photos, vectors and HD videos. The lowest price starts at $1. Pixabay is the other one, which I use quite a bit. Both, Fotolia and Pixabay provide some free images. If you search Google, you will find out number of sites, which sell stock photos. You can also find out the free images available over the internet. How do you find free images? It’s really very easy.

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·Open Google and click on Images to search only Images.

·Now enter your key word and search.

·Once, the search result is shown, click on the settings button on the right hand top and click on “Advanced Search”.

·Now scroll down and you can see the last label “Usage Rights”. Now click on the drop-down box and select “free to use or share, even commercially”. Now click on advanced search button.

The filtered results will show you the free images, which can be used in your website. But, before downloading the photo, you need to still check the copyright statement and license agreement.

Commenting tricks for successful link building

Link building is nightmare for many website owners. Whether you have a personal blog or a website to market your product or service, you cannot ignore the importance of link building. When someone searches in Google, google fetches all the pages that match the search criteria and assign a rank to each search result. The assignment of a Google rank depends on the popularity of the website. And one of the most important parameters, which determine the page rank, is backlink from other sites.

Let us closely look in this matter. Google believes that if a website is popular and having good content, it is referred through links from many other websites. More the number of backlinks, the more popular the site is. So, when deriving the page rank, Google gives good weightage in number of backlinks to the site. But, it is not pure number of links, which all matters. It also takes into consideration of the popularity of the webpage from where the particular site is being referred. Thus a link from a high PR site carries more weightage than a low PR site. In other word, Google simply believes that high PR sites are more credible.

Photo attribution: Mschel (Own work) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html)

Now, as I said in the beginning, link building is often a daunting task, though it is not impossible. There are many ways that you can create links. For example, you can write an article for some other website. This is quite time consuming and also, you will be at the mercy of the other websites to approve your article. Since Google considers comments and as well as forum as a place of reference, providing comments is one of the fast ways to build your reputation. But there is a small trick. When considering popularity by considering number of backlinks, Google also considers outbound link from your page. And these outbound links nullify to some extent the popularity that you gained by having inbound links from other sites. As a result, most of the websites mention the outbound link as “nofollow”. This tells Google that the mentioned link may not be a credible source and it doesn’t crawl further down.

You leave your comments in a website in order to continue your link building exercise. But, the site may be a “nofollow” comment site and hence you will not get any credit because of such link. Thus, it will be complete waste of your time, if you spend time to leave comments in such sites. However, there are number of sites, which encourage providing comments and do NOT have the “nofollow” attribute. There is a Firefox extension, which helps you to find out the “nofollow” links. You can download the extension by clicking on this link. It is a good practice to find out such websites and leave your comments on regular basis.

While leaving comments, you need to keep in mind few things. See from the angle of the owner of the website, where you are leaving your comments. The sole purpose of the comment section is to invite feedback and receive views from different angles. In such scenario, it is not expected from you to leave just a comment like “nice article”. Many times such comment is treated as spam comment. Thus, don’t leave a comment only for getting a backlink. Provide meaningful comment aligned to the original article.

How to choose and install a blogger template

Google’s Blogger is one of the most popular free platforms for writing blogs. The popularity of Google’s blogger is owing to the presence of its multiple features and as well as Google’s heavy weightage. Thus, if you have fascination for writing, you have the blogger platform to let the whole world know your writing skill. The advantage of using blogger is that it will always be given preference by google, when someone searches for some information.

Along with many other features, google’s blogger has come up with plethora of blogger templates. Apart from Google’s own templates, you can opt to download blog template available at many websites. Many templates are available for free and some are available at cost. You can download blog template from any of these websites.

 

Once, you download it, go to the design mode of your blog. On the left-hand side menu, click on “Template” and then click on “BackupRestore” on the right hand corner.

Click on “Download Full Template”, to download your template. This can be used, if something is messed up during the installation process. Now click on “choose file” and select your downloaded template. Now your new template should be installed.

 

Choosing a blogger template – When choosing a blogger template, you may check few options.

 

Style – Most of the websites including Google’s blogger templates are categorized in different styles. You may want to choose the most appropriate for your kind of blog. For example, you can see Templates based on Travel in blogger. That may not suit to your blog. So you may have to spend good time to find out a suitable style, which matches to your blog.

 

Color – Color is very important. Your subject and color walk hand in hand. For example, it is inappropriate to choose a black color for a kid’s website.

 

Columns – Once you select your style and color, concentrate on the organization of the template. You need to decide on the number of columns, you want for your blog. 1 column blogger template means that you have the original contents in place. 2 column blogger template means that you have a side bar and so on.

 

For the premium blogger templates, you may have sliding photos, designed tab and many other features. So, if you have any special need, you may have to search the webs quite a bit.

 

You can download blog template from some of the websites listed below for your easy reference

 

BTemplates (http://btemplates.com/) : One of my favourite websites for free blogger templates. This website has blogs categorized in column 1, column 2 etc. It has approximately 4360 blogger templates.

 

Besttheme (http://besttheme.net/category/blogger-template/) : This has around 65 free blogger templates in stock

 

Bloggermint (http://www.bloggermint.com/tag/blogger-templates/) : It contains both free and as well as premium blogger template.

 

Makingdifferent (http://www.makingdifferent.com/search/label/Templates) : This website has responsive template. A responsive template is a template, which changes its size according to the screen size of the device.

 

Hongkiat(http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/40-free-beautiful-blogger-templates-part-iii/) : A good website for blogger templates.