How To Find Free Blog Images and Optimize Them

When it comes to writing engaging blog posts, having optimized carefully selected images can be a good way to engage your readers and encourage interest in your posts. Images are also an important aspect of a business blog's SEO strategy and can help bring in readers based on organic search. There are several ways to optimize your images and this post will hopefully help give you some tips on how you can find the best images you can and then how you can optimize them.

First things first, why are images important?

1. Images add visual interest to your posts and can help illustrate your point
2. Images are one of the  first things people look at when they come to your blog post and can help draw a reader in 
3. An intriguing image can help create curiosity about the content of your post
4. Interesting images are easy to remember and can help your readers memorize the subject or key point in your post
5. Having optimized images is essential for helping you get found in Google Image Search

1. Flickr. We're sure that most of your have heard of Flickr, one of the most popular video and photo sharing sites on the internet today. Flickr can be a great place to find interesting blog images. By choosing the "Only search Creative Commons-Licensed Content" under the "Advanced Search" section, you can search thousands of photos licensed specifically for shared use.
2. Webshots. Webshots is another popular video and photo sharing site. The site has free account sign up, similar to Flickr, but it doesn't have a Creative Commons search option so to use images you need to send a message to the user who owns the photo and request permission to use the image. This might seem like a little bit more work, but if it's the right image, it's worth it!  
3. Stock.xchange. This is a photo sharing database, where you can search and download free stock photos uploaded by other users.
4. PhotoXpress. Is also a stock photo database with a free option. After setting up your free account, and filling in the information requested you can earn a certain number of free photo downloads a day from their free photo database.
5. Every Stock Photo. This site is a license-specific photo search engine that indexes millions of freely-licensed stock photos from around the web and then presents them in an integrated search.
6. PicFindr. PicFindr is similar to Every Stock Photo in that it is a search engine that indexes freely-licensed images from around the web for users to search. 

1. Ensure that your Alt Text and Image Title are optimized. The Alt Text of an image is essential for both website usability and accessibility because it is designed to describe an image when the image itself isn't available to be viewed. Good Alt Text includes a clear description of your image including keywords. On the other hand, an Image Title is meant to provide additional information about an image and is the text that pops up when you hover over an image in some browsers. A good Image Title should describe the image, be catchy and should also include your keywords. You can read more about this from Search Engine Journal here.
2. Be conscious of width and height. Specifying the height and width of an image, rather than scaling an image using HTML, allows for faster rendering by eliminating the need for unnecessary repaints and reflows. You can read more about this from Google and Yahoo!.
   
3. Watch out for file names. Using descriptive file names is a quick way to increase your search engine traffic. Make sure that when you upload your images you change the file name to something descriptive of the image itself rather than allowing a default name.
4. Know which image format is best. For large images it's best to use JPGs, and when images are low or flat-color, PNGs or GIFs are preferable. You can read the reasoning behind this in a great post from WebsiteOptimization.com.

Posted by Amberlie Denny at August 4, 2010 8:00 AM

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