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Free Blog Images - Guidelines for Blogging images Use
Whether they are free Blog images or paid for, using them within blog post bring some benefits.
But failure to adhere to some guidelines which this article discusses, using blog images could have some disadvantages for your blog.
Images for Blogs
Using Blog images within blog posts on the surface is a very good way to add nice coloring to your site. But they do far more than that.
The Benefits of using Images within your Blog posts
Remember what they say : "A picture say a thousand words".
Photos especially the ones that directly illustrates a point, gets readers attention and draws them to your posts.
Images also acts as content and brings traffic to your site. Depending on your topic, you could get lots of traffic to your site through image search in search engines.
Images also boost a page's ranking.
Points to Note about using Images
Not all topic lend itself properly to the addition of images.
There are some topics where you can't find an image to illustrate your point. In that case, do not sweat it, just provide good valuable blog content .
But if your topic is about travel, photography and the likes, then you have to seriously consider using some good images within your content. And optimize the images for the search engines.
To optimize your images just add a descriptive text including the keyword for that page (or a keyword that better describes the picture) in the 'alt' column when uploading your photo to your post.
How Blog Images can Affect your blog Negatively
Like I said before whether they are free blog images or paid for, using them just like it has some benefits could have disadvantages for your blog when it's not properly used.
The size and format of a photo used on a site is very important.
If the size is too large, especially if you use lots of images, it can eat up your hosting space quickly that you would have to upgrade.
Using large photo sizes can also increase the load time of your pages. And this could make your readers reluctant to come to your site.
Your page ranking could be affected as a result since Google has announced that page load time is now one of the criteria for page ranking.
So before uploading an image to your blog, make sure you re-size them to smaller sizes and use a web friendly format to save.
The web friendly image formats are :
JPEG .jpg extension
PNG .png extension
Gif . gif extension
They are referred to as web friendly because they compress the size of the file so that your pages can load faster.
They also ensure your images appear on your pages the exact way you saved them.
TIFF (.tif) and Bitmap (.bmp) files are usually too large. So when used they increases your pages load time.
How to Re-size Photos
You can manually re-size your photos using photo editing programs. Such as photo-shop, Microsoft paint e.t.c.
How to Re-size Images in Microsoft Paint
First download the image to your computer. Then locate paint on your computer under 'accessories' and open it.
Open the photo you downloaded to your computer in paint. Click on the Select icon.
Place your mouse on each of the functions there and it will display what they are.
After clicking on select, cut the image to the size you want. Then click on the file menu and select new.
Now it asks you whether you want to save the former image, say No. And paste the the image you cut to the new window and save.
You could also save yourself the time and just use one of the online image editing solutions.
I have found picnik.com helpful. But most times the site takes time to load. You need a fast internet connection to use it.
In cases where you want a text in an image to be obvious to your readers, it's always good to first use Paint to cut and save. Before using picnik it to further re-size. If you use picnik straight the text might become blurred.
Update: The last time I visited Picnik.com they said they were shutting it down. So you'll have to look for a similar online image editing solution.
How and Where to find Free blog images
If you really want to customize your blog with images and stand out, it's better you take your own pictures.
But we all know that not everyone can or have the time. So you can consider buying photos from photo selling sites. Like Dreamstime and istockphoto.
Or you can use public domain photos. Here are some free photo sites.
http://www.picapp.com/
http://www.sxc.hu/
http://www.everystockphoto.com/
http://www.freedigitalphotos.net/
If you find an image you like, download to your computer.
And then edit as explained above, if the image is too big, but if not just save and use the way it is.
Most free blog images require you to credit them for the images, if that is the case please do so or don't use free blog images.
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