Writing Archives – All Blogging Tips

Do You Know These Top 10 Websites to Find Free Images for Your Blog?

I recently found out that adding pictures to individual blog post really makes each article sticky and resonates more with those who read it, because an image tells more story than a bunch of words crumpled together. But due to the advent of copyright laws online these days, you can’t just pick up any beautiful image you see online and slap it into your blog post, because if the owner of that image hasn’t given you right to use it, then you might end up be sued for copyright infringement (which might warrant you taking down the photo).

So in other to avoid this copyright infringement and stay on the safe side of things, you might want to stay clear copyrighted images and focus on those ones which are free to use.

In case you don’t know where to find such free images as aforementioned above, below are 7 awesome websites that you ransack today in your search for free images.

1. EverstockPhoto [http://www.everstockphoto.com]

Everstockphoto is one of the most popular website to find free images, it is known to be the search engine for free images. Their images comes from many sources but don’t feel uncomfortable they are all license specified.

Creating an account on everstockphoto for free, you can upload, tag, comment and collect images on behave of your free account.

Currently they are having more than a million images on their site. Everstock was launched in April 2006.

One of their main aim is to become the leading portal for the stock exchange photography community, and add more features to service.

2. Stock.XCHNG [http://www.sxc.hu]

This awesome website is probably of the biggest places on the internet to look for free images. It has over 400,000 free images on virtually different any topic on the internet; ranging from Arts, Technology, blogging etc. Also, since it’s now owned by Getty Image, be expecting to see more enhanced image search services on the long haul. Give them a try today.

3. Free Photos Bank [http://freephotosbank.com]

This is another awesome site to get free images for your blog posts. Free Photo Bank offers you an awesome option to see which photos are the most downloaded and the good thing is – you really don’t have to register in other to download them. Plus you can decide to use it literally for anything you have in mind.

4. Photo Pin [http://photopin.com]

An awesome website that is among the best when you want beautiful images, top-quality and elegant free photos for your personal use, Although each images there are under the protection of creative commons licensing – this means if you end up using any of photos from Photo Pin you’d need to link back to the original source.

5. Freedigitalphoto.net [http://www.freedigitalphotos.net]

Yet another awesome free image community, they have a unique way of uploading images on their website. All their photos are free, either business, personal or educational, it all free. although their images are of small size, but they are all perfect, if you need the larger size of their image then you need to go for the premium account.

6. Foter [http://foter.com]

This is yet another free image website where bloggers can come and get relevant photos for their blog posts. And just like Photo Pin above, you can use any of the images but you mustn’t forget to give credit back to the image source.

Apart from that, there’s no other restriction, so you can decide to use the images as you deem fit.

7. Unprofound [http://www.unprofound.com]

There are enormous amount of totally FREE relevant images for you to use if you’re targeting to get an image impromptu.

With Unprofound , which I consider the best because of the no-restriction it gives with the use of it images; you can use the images gotten from there for anything you have in mind. Either for educational, personal or commercial purposes, images from Unprofound will help you better in being on the safe side of things.

8. Comp Fight [http://compfight.com]

Comp Fight makes it quite easy searching for Creative-Commons-Licensed images for your content uses daily. The beauty of this site is it ability to search out relevant images from Flickr and combining it to their own images so that you can get the most relevant image search ever.

9. Morguefile [http://morguefile.com]

It has a massive amount of images for free download, ranging from arts to all kinds of images. But these images can only be used for personal, practical and educational uses and it can’t be sold or used for commercial purposes. So while using images from Morguefile you might want to be really careful not to end up using it for things other than what I just mentioned above.

10. Stockvault [http://www.stockvault.net/]

On my last list is stockvault, not that stockvault is the worse free images community. Among the images communtiy listed here it’s one of the best community to find free images. It was launched in 2004, its a community for students, graphics designers and photographers, these three group of people can share images for others to use without no cost. They are having over 30,000 free images available on the website.

You can even try these two websites to find quality images for your blog posts

So in conclusion, all these sites are the best in terms of getting free images and they can keep you safe from photographer’ wrath if you adhere to follow all the instructions attached to using each images gotten from their sites.

But let ask, did I miss your favourite free image website? Please tell us yours in the comments. Thanks for reading.

Double Your Blog Traffic with Long Tail Keywords

By Zac Johnson / Free Traffic, How To

Are you having trouble ranking in the search engines or increasing your overall blog traffic?

If so, maybe it’s time you stop focusing on generic keywords ad start to explore the world of long tail keywords using long tail pro.

What are long tail keywords you ask?

Here’s a simple way to explain it… “wordpress” is a generic search term. If you search for it in Google you will find various topics. Now if you were to search for “free wordpress installation service”, that’s a long tail keyword and if you search for it, you know exactly what you are looking for.

What are long tail keywords better than generic keywords?

Easy! :D

Not only are they much easier to rank for, but they are super targeted in comparison to generic keywords.

Let’s use “wordpress” again as an example and see how it stacks up in comparison to other long tail variations of the keyword when using Google Keyword Tool.

What you can learn from this is that you can write articles, format titles and focus the efforts of your backlink building to these terms and have a much better chance at ranking in the search results.

Yes, many of these keywords have a low amount of search volume, but they are much more targeted.

If someone is searching for “wordpress setup service” you can be they are looking to have a wordpress blog setup!

Find the Best Long Tail Keywords with Long Tail Pro

One of my favorite software programs out there is called Long Tail Pro, which allows you to look up long tail keywords. It works much like Google Keyword Tool but it also provides you with an competition score, which tells you how hard or easy it will be for you to rank in the search results.

You can see a screenshot of the Long Tail Pro results below, using the same keywords we mentioned above.

You can see from the chart above that some of these keywords are very easy to rank for. Easy to rank for keywords are in the 20-30 range, medium competition is in the 30-40 range and anything above 50 is quite competitive.

Again, it is important to note that the volume on these search phrases is low, but if you were able to rank on the first page for some of these terms, you would be bringing in some very highly targeted traffic to your site month after month.

Also if you do the work to target high paying keywords, such as “hosting” related keywords, this could result in a few hundred to a few thousands extra dollars per months.

This is one of the major reasons why it’s important to look at the overall value of your long term keywords and not just the amount of people who are searching for the keywords in a given month.

Features of Long Tail Pro

Here are a quick features and review of long tail pro keyword research tool.

Quick 5 Minute Step: You can setup long tail pro within few mintues, You can quickly get targeted traffic, lead generation made easy!

Simple: Easy to use, allows you to create targeted campaigns and research competitors.

Effective Optimization: You can use long tail pro keyword research tool to get any type of business result you want. Easy to use.

Grab Long Tail Pro Now for 37$

Even Google Wants You to Use Long Tail Keywords

Yes, it’s true! Even Google prefers that users of their search engines use long tail keywords over generic search terms.

It provides better search results for the people using Google, and especially for the advertisers of the search engine as well.

Just take a look at the screenshot below and see how Google lists a bunch of long tail variations for you to choose from at the bottom of each search page.

Start Incorporating Long Tail Keywords into Your Blog

There are many free tools out there like Google Keyword Tool, Google Analytics and free trial versions of Long Tail Pro that will allow you to analyze the type of traffic and search terms people are using to get to your site.

For all of these reasons and many more, you should be using long tail keywords to write better content for your site, target your content better to your audience and rank higher in the search engines.

Tactics Needed To Increase the Traffic to a Blog

By smartblogwriter / Blogger Tips, Free Traffic, Search Engine Optimization

For professional SEO firms, it is very easy to build a blog but it gets very difficult to maintain the correct amount of visitors. The art of tracking the right audience is rare and without it, blogs lack value. There are a few tactics which can help many people with their blogs. These tactics are divided into the following points.

Increasing Traffic Graph

1) When you are writing content for your blog, you must know the sort of audience you are targeting. When you are writing your blog you must always see if the audience has the ability to spread the word and share the information on your blog. There are certain types of writing styles, content, etc. Which attract a particular community or a certain group of people. For example, any review on the latest Gothic music might attract people who are interested in listening to dark music while videos related to dance might attract all the dancers out there. Targeting a group that would be interested in sharing your blog might help you make your blog become popular. While targeting people who are less likely to share might decrease the chances of your blog being famous across the web.

There are essentially three groups which you need to consider when you are targeting an audience for your blog:

i) Potential Consumers of the Blog
ii) Content Sharers
iii) Content Distributors

2) You can also share information regarding your blog on web communities where most of your target audience is present. For example, if a company wants to target an audience for sports good, you won’t obviously target a group of video game lovers. Rather you will target a group that is actively involved in some kind of sports. Now you do not have to spend a lot of time searching where your target audience is more likely to be found.

Audience that shares brings in more traffic

You can use the Madison Avenue or the Double Clicks Ad Planner to see where what sort of audience is found. Once you find out the correct target audience you can start communicating with them and start posting things. But you must always post things if you think that they are appropriate instead of creating a hotchpotch. If you do that you will get the reputation of an undeserving, infamous blogger. You must always try to respect the rules of web traffic and be a good web citizen.

3) You must always make the content of your blog SEO friendly as this would help you in finding the correct amount of traffic. Search engines are very easy in tracking the correct traffic and it can be made even better using SEO friendly platforms like Blogger, WordPress, etc.

4) You must use social communities like Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, etc. To spread the word about your blog. This would help you in getting the required traffic as well.

5) Another thing which is recommended by most successful bloggers is that they install Google Analytics which is free and very helpful. It helps in telling you where the target audience is.

6) You must allow guest posts on your blog as this would also attract visitors and help you increase the publicity of your blog.

7) You must be consistent in your blog posts. You must post the content of your blog regularly as any delay would result in your blog losing a large amount of target audience.

Incorporating the above tips will substantially increase the traffic to your blog. For more information, you can also contact professionals like the Simple SEO Group.