Best Websites for Stock Free Photos

We quite often need to use images for our websites or blogs and for getting legit images we always end up buying them, and spend a lot of $. But there are many websites on Internet which offer free Royalty Free Photos. I sharing some of the best websites which offer Free Stock Photos. Please drop by if you know any other too.

stock.xchng


stock.xchng - the leading free stock photography site

Getty Images


Royalty Free Images   Photos  Unlimited Use   Getty Images

FreeDigitalPhotos.net


Free Photos - Free Images - Royalty Free Photos - Free Stock Photos - FreeDigitalPhotos.net

morgueFile


morgueFile free photos for creatives by creatives

Corbis Images


Corbis Images – Premium Quality Stock Photography and Illustrations

everystockphoto


everystockphoto - searching free photos

Public Domain Pictures


Public Domain Pictures - Free Stock Photos

Stockvault.net


Stockvault.net - Free Stock Photos and Free Images

Jupiterimages


Stockvault.net - Free Stock Photos and Free Images

freerangestock.com


Free Stock Photos at freerangestock.com - Totally Free Stock Photography and Textures

Stock Images on deviantART


Stock Images on deviantART

Flickr


Welcome to Flickr - Photo Sharing

Dreamstime’s Free Stock Images and Photos


Dreamstime - Download Free Stock Images and Photos

Fotolia’s Free Stock Images and Photos


Fotolia's Free Stock Images and Photos

iStockphoto’s Free Stock Images and Photos


iStockphoto's Free Collection

Creative Commons Search


Creative Commons Search

Blogging Tips for Better Search Engine Rankings

Despite of many articles on SEO for Blogs, I am writing this one because most of them need professional SEO techniques and good amount of time. Here I will be sharing few simple tips which can increase your Blog Post’s Search Engine Visibility and can be implemented while writing posts.

Keywords

Keywords are an important aspect for Search Engine Optimization, keywords are what we input when we search on web, picking up the correct keywords thus helps a lot in increasing your Blog Post’s Search Engine Rankings.

Selecting Keywords
When you are starting with your post, it is recommended to include keywords relevant to your post and which are more popular. You can use Google trends for checking popularity of the keywords, and then include the most popular and relevant keywords into your post. Inserting more popular keywords basically means that they are searched more, and hence chances of you getting Search Engine traffic also increases.

Inserting Them
Make sure all the keywords are relevant to your article and it is recommended to have one keyword per line, too much of keyword density or too similar keywords will only help you score negatively. It is also highly recommended to insert the keywords in the post title and subtitles(Between header tags) and you should time to time bold, italicize and underline keywords in between the paragraphs to emphasize them when Search Engine bots crawls your article.

Linking

Linking is also a very important aspect of Search Engine Optimization for Blogs, there are many long link building techniques and methods which give good results.

Interlinking
Interlinking for your Blog posts means that linking keywords or words of your article to other posts of your Blog. Below are two more good ways of interlinking.

Recent Posts Or Further Reading
You can also include a “Recent Posts” Or “Further Reading” section in footer of your post which will simply display related posts to your current post, this will alsoincrease usefulness of your article, like if your reader wants to learn more about that particular topic he/she can simply browse those links. If you are onWordPress, you can use WordPress Related Posts Plugin for inserting automated Related Posts rather than doing it manually.

Breadcrumbs
Its also advisable to have breadcrumbs in header of your posts or pages, breadcrumbs are navigational links which tells the location of your article,
like “Category>> Subcategory>> Article“,
Example: “Blogging Tips>> Making Money>> Choosing Advertising Platforms”. If you are on WordPress you can use Breadcrumb NavXT, it is a great plugins and produces breadcrumbs very efficiently.

I hope these few points helps you with Search Engine ranking for your articles.

 

Guide to Sitemaps – What? Why? How?

A website/blog is like a book, and thus it also needs a index or table of contents. In web terminology we call this ‘table of contents’ sitemap. There are mainly two kinds of sitemaps.

HTML Sitemap: It is meant to be accessed by your website’s visitors, which helps them to browse your website, see what they have point of interest in and increase your website’s/blog’s usability. It is simply a hierarchical list of links on a web page. Most of the (premium)WordPress themes now have in built Sitemap page template. Otherwise some or other WordPress plugin is always there to do the job. Click here for an example of a HTML Sitemap.

XML Sitemap: These kind of sitemaps are meant for search engine bots to crawl, you can submit one of these to search engines after building it. It is one of the most important aspect in large websites. Click here for an example of an XML Sitemap.

Creating a sitemap

HTML Sitemap

If you are using a CMS like WordPress or Joomla, both kinds of sitemaps can be built easily using various plugins/components, like you can use this to create a HTML Sitemap on WordPress.

Otherwise, if you have a normal website, you can easily create it with any usual WYSIWYG editor. You should start by creating a list of your pages, then adding the sub pages below the parent pages, and then linking them. After the skeleton has been made, style the sitemap page(using CSS),  match it to your website layout and then put it live after testing all the links.

XML Sitemap

Creating an XML sitemap has never been this easier. If you are on WordPress(like me) you can use this amazing plugin Google XML Sitemaps. It builds your sitemap very adequately also, it notifies all major search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo etc, every time you create a post about the new content. If you are on Joomla, you can use Xmap it has much more features that its WordPress counter part.

Again, if you have a normal website, and you are an advanced user(who knows XML, HTML, etc) you can create the sitemap yourself. The below example shows a Sitemap in XML format. The Sitemap in the example contains a small number of URLs, each using a different set of optional parameters. Please remember that your sitemap should always be UTF-8 encoded.

{code type=XML}
<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?>
<urlset xmlns=”http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9″>
<url>
<loc>http://www.example.com/</loc>
<lastmod> 2005-01-01 </lastmod>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
<priority> 0.8 </priority>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://www.example.com/catalog?item=12&amp;desc=vacation_hawaii</loc>
<changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://www.example.com/catalog?item=73&amp;desc=vacation_new_zealand</loc>
<lastmod> 2004-12-23 </lastmod>
<changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://www.example.com/catalog?item=74&amp;desc=vacation_newfoundland</loc>
<lastmod> 2004-12-23T18:00:15+00:00 </lastmod>
<priority> 0.3 </priority>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://www.example.com/catalog?item=83&amp;desc=vacation_usa</loc>
<lastmod> 2004-11-23 </lastmod>
</url>
</urlset>
{/code}

Thanks to sitemaps.org for supplying with this brilliant example,
you can see the tag definitions here.

The other and more recommended way to create sitemaps is to use any of the XML Sitemap Generator services available online, you can find plenty of them online.
The one I like is XML-Sitemaps.com (Maximum 500 pages).
It does most of the job itself, and just leaves the uploading part for you.

Specifying Sitemap in robots.txt file

You should include the location of your sitemap in your robots.txt file so that search engine finds it when accessing your robots.txt , you can insert it using the below code.
{code type=CSS}
Sitemap: http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml
{/code}

 

After you are done with your XML Sitemap. I will recommend you to submit it to your Google Webmaster account. Google will index it in a little while, and you can see effective results.

Other types of sitemaps

Of course there are few more kinds of sitemaps, I am including a few below.

RSS Feeds: They are not really sitemaps, but rather web feeds meant for feed readers, but they do work as great sitemaps for blogs.

ROR Sitemap: A variant of XML sitemaps, much more robust that XML and support various kinds of formats. See more here.

Video/Geo/ News Sitemap: They content links to your videos/geo-content/news articles so that they are searchable in Google Video/Google Maps/Google News.

Mobile Sitemap: Mobile sitemaps contain a lists of web pages made particularly for mobiles, for search engine’s mobile index. Here is an example of a Mobile Sitemap

Google Search Tips

Remember these:

  • Google default is to search for pages that include all of your search keywords .
  • Google excludes common words (a.k.a stop words) like “the” , “He” etc.
  • Google isn’t case sensitive, That is searching for wordpress is the same as WordPress.
  • But Search operators are case sensitive, That is searching for wordpress OR joomla uses OR as the Google search operator, while wordpress or joomla doesn’t.
  • Some operators may be combined, and some must be used alone.

Basic Operators

+

forces words to be included in search results. Useful with stop words that otherwise will be discarded

prevents a search term to show in results, for example searching for doughnut -cream can help you to avoid creamy doughnuts

OR

returns documents with one of the given terms, like doughnut OR donut. You can also use | instead of OR: doughnut | donut

” “

using quotes forces google to search for the exact phrase (including stop words), try “doughnut at midnight” and doughnut at midnight (actually, using quotes is similar, but not equals, to doughnut-at-midnight … it would be interesting to know what is the exact difference in SERP)

~

allow to search also for synonyms of the given word. searching for doughnut ~tips finds also pages with the word help or guide etc.

*

means every word. try “doughnuts with *”

..

Used to search in a range of numbers, “2..20 doughnuts” will find pages containing “I eat 3 doughnuts a day” and “I’ll never eat more than 15 doughnuts in a month”

This operators can be combined to create advanced queries, for example “I eat 1..100 doughnut OR doughnuts OR donut OR donuts each *”

Basic Search Operators

The basic Search operators which can be combine with your keywords easily are:

+

Forces words to be included in search results. Convenient with stop words that otherwise will be dumped

Prevents a search term to be included in the results, Like: searching for Automobile -cars won’t show the result for Cars in the Automobile search result page

OR

Returns with with one of the given terms, like Joomla OR Drupal. You might also use | instead of OR

” “

It is used to include all of the words given by you in search results, Remember to put the query within the “ ” . I use it to check copy and paste content.

~

Allows to search also for synonyms of the given keyword. like searching for wordpress ~tips finds also pages with the word help or guide etc.

*

Means every word to include(It’s a wildcard character) .

..

Used to search in a range of numbers

The above operators may be combined like, “Is WordPress better than Joomla OR Drupal”

Some more useful operators

define:

Used to return the definition of the given word like “define: guide”

filetype:

Restricts the results returned of a specific File Type. Like “Photoshop Guide filetype:pdf”

site:

Restricts the search results for a given web site only like “Google site:priteshgupta.com”

related:

Returns page that are related to the given page

info:

Gives information about a given site

Google’s Calculator

I use Google as a calculator too, by using standard symbols (+ – * / % ^)

Like: “2+10-5%2” = 11, Google calculates in the manner which is done in programming languages.

You can also make it a scientific calculator using the below terms

sqrt,nth root ofx, sin, cos, arctan, tan…, ln, log, !

Numbers can be entered in hexadecimal, octal and binary base.

PS: There are many more things which you can do it Google but I have included which are useful.

Also see: http://www.google.com/landing/searchtips/

Microsoft Bing: Awesome !

Bing the latest offering from Microsoft is a great search engine, Its better than Google in various ways.

Bing has a better and more meaningful “Related Search”. It uses technology from Powerset (a search technology company Microsoft acquired) to display refined versions of your query down the left side of the page.
Bing also pop ups the text in the result page when you hover above the search result. Which will give the idea about to follow the result or not.
It has a Video Search in which one can refine the query by Length OR Screen size OR Resolution OR Source. I found this to be Good.
It’s Image search has all the features of Google as well as Introduced some more like layout, style, people.

And it knows that different kind of data is best represented in different format it will be hard to maintain this thing though as MS will depend on different sites to collect this data from.

Overall, The bing search is much more than expected and it may replace Google in Future as its just the beginning of Bing !.