Search Engine Optimization

I personally use a lot of images on pages and blog posts.
Here's a list of some image search engines and databases.

Flickr - This is the most well-known photo sharing and hosting website. Flickr is owned by Yahoo . It's full of generic and amateur pictures, but if you dig around you'll find many professional images.

Some of the images are copyright protected, and you can't save them with "save image as" command. In cases where I like the image too much I'll take a screen shot and then cut it out. This is NOT legal, so watch out.

If you'd rather not run into this problem, there's a way to avoid it. On Flickr, enter your search query in its search box, and then search. After the search comes up, you'll be given the option of clicking on "Advanced Search." Click on that, and scroll down. Near the bottom, you'll be able to click on a box that tells Flickr to search only within Creative Commons-licensed content. This is content for which the copyright holder has chosen to give up certain very specific rights, usually to allow wider distribution of their work.

Google Image Search - Their image search is pretty decent.

Live Image Search - It's sometimes better than Google, sometimes worse.

IStockPhoto - This is the place to buy 100% legal, professional images at cheap prices. For around $10 - $20 you can purchase around 5 - 15 high quality images. Prices depend on image resolution. Before buying you can select the resolution you like, with the smallest being around 400x500 and the largest going past 2500+. You can also buy professional videos and vector images at higher prices. I find their selection to be very broad, and recommend this site.

Stock Xchng - Here you can get professional images for free. I just discovered this site, so I can't really comment how good it is. Try it out for yourself.

Photobucket - This is a free image hosting website. Many eBayers and blog writers use this to host their images. Though it has tons of images, they are usually unlabeled, so it's very hard to find anything. It's perfect for hosting, though.

SlideShare - Slideshare is not related to image search or image hosting in any manner, but since the site is useful I had to include it somewhere. Basically you can share PowerPoint presentations online and embed them on sites, like YouTube videos. Very useful.

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By admin1neu on 17 January 2010 |

List of SEO Tools - Content Management Systems

Joomla - This is a free, open source content management system. It reaches the level of an enterprise content management system in terms of features. As you'd expect from an actively used and developed open source piece of software, it has thousands of free extensions and add-ons.
Its down side is also as you would expect for open source software. If it gets buggy, there's no customer service people for you to take your complaints to and ask for help.

WordPress - Simply put, this is the best known blog platform on the Internet. WordPress is capable of producing search engine friendly pages and has tons of plug-ins.

This blogging platform has been around for quite a while -- more than six years, in fact -- so it's easy to find articles that explain how to set it up for your particular purposes. Also, since it is so popular, many major web hosts support its use. The best part is that it's free.
Open Source CMS (http://www.opensourcecms.com/) - Here you can find tons of free content management systems of all kinds. You're quite likely to find one that will suit your needs and the needs of your web site perfectly, or close to perfectly.

Keep in mind, however, that choosing a content management system is an important decision; it will affect everything you do (and CAN do) with your web site. So get some feedback on forums before getting one, because once you have content within a CMS, it's hard to change anything.

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By admin1neu on 17 January 2010 |

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