A picture is worth a thousand words. I could write a long and elaborate description of this tantalizing strawberry cheesecake. Or I could give you an idea of how delicious it may be with one simple photograph. Sometimes, all you need is one powerful graph, chart or image to instantly convey the big picture. And studies are showing that compelling graphics drive more traffic and eyeballs to your content.

Most of us are not big corporations with massive budgets and in-house designers. All we need is a sizzling image to spice up our already great content. But finding high-quality images that you can use without attribution, without licensing troubles, and without having to purchase each time is a challenge. Also, there are several stock-photo sites that charge a high premium to buy photos. These sites are good for corporations with large budgets.

So what do you do if you need a quick photo to enhance your blog post, slide presentation or whitepaper? There are plenty or sources – some free and some that you can purchase at a small cost.

I like to either click my own photos or buy them relatively inexpensively from sites that have pay-as-you-go plans. That way, in my small way, I’ve contributed to the artist and I’m not stuck to one site. I have the option of trying several different sites.

Sites that have high resolution, low-cost Images

#1. Canstockphoto.com

You can buy pay-as-you-go plans for as low as $19. You get 20 credits and most small size images cost you 2 credits. So you end up paying about $1 per image.

#2. Istockphoto

Although this is a slightly pricier option than all the other sites here, I like to use it when I need high-resolution images.

#3. 123RF.com

I’ve often found some great, low-cost images on this site. I’ve paid as little as 40 cents for some images. They’re also a great option for slides and presentations.

#4. Bigstockphoto

A subsidiary of Shutterstock, Bigstock adds to its library every day as photographers and designers from around the world submit their work. Bigstock had more than 5.3 million royalty-free images available. Images cost from between 1 to 6 credits each, depending on size, with credits ranging from 90 cents to $3.

Sites for free images

When using free images there are a few things to keep in mind:

• Always be mindful of copyright issues. One rule is clear – if you didn’t produce it or click it with your camera then you don’t own it.
• Always give attribution to the artist. No matter what your source, it’s a good practice to credit the artist when possible.
• Read the license carefully to see if you can reproduce image, only use the image in it’s original form etc. This is escpecially true for Creative Commons licenses, where there are so many different ways for an artist to give permission.
• Regardless of where you get your images, it’s best to follow these image optimization practices.

# 5. Freedigitalphotos.net

This is my favorite site for images. Small images are free and they have a great range of high-quality, low-cost images.

# 6. Google image search

Google’s Image search now has various choices that make it easy to find an image for reuse. You need to click on the option for Search tools and you will be able to search by size, color, type and usage rights. I’ve often found that most of these images are copyright images.

You can find images on Google Search with different usage rights

#7. Morguefile.com

MorgueFile contains free high resolution digital stock photography for either corporate or public use. The term “morgueFile” is popular in the newspaper business to describe the file that holds past issues for reference. Through the years, the term has been used by illustrators, comic book artist, designers and teachers to mean post production materials or an inactive job file. The purpose of this site is to provide free image reference material for use in all creative pursuits.

#8. Stock.XCHNG

This site has a large gallery of over 395,000 stock photos. You can search by country, users, photos or browse through categories. They also have a nice collection of tutorials, various “how-tos” on stock photography and image editing.

#9. Free Range Stock

Once you sign up for free, you can use these images for commercial and non-commercial use. Photographers get paid when users click on the ads that appear next to their submissions. Images on the site are either shot by or contributed by a talented community of photographers. According to their website, “The images want to be seen and good photos should be available to everyone – so we give the collections away with the hope that they will be useful and be enjoyed.”

#10. Creativecommons.com

Creative Commons is a nonprofit organization that lets artists share their creativity and knowledge through free legal tools. It provides artists with a simple, standardized way to allow the public to use their work. The artists can choose from sixteen different licenses ranging from giving full rights to some rights. I’ve often found the Creative Commons licenses to be confusing but some people swear by them and use them all the time.
Photo-sharing sites such as Flickr have the option to search by Creative Commons license.

Also, from time-to-time Hubspot gives away images that you can use without worrying about attribution and licensing.

Your turn

Which are your favorite sites for finding images? Please share them in the comments below. We’ll all benefit from the info. Thanks.

Seo is more different today than it was one year ago, 6 months ago or even 3 months ago. The right tools will prepare you for this evolving landscape. These tools will also help increase your online visibility.
My previous post dealt with content writing tools. This post focuses on the types of SEO tools we need as we move further along the semantic web. Also, as content marketing, SEO and social media merge, the right SEO tools will allow us to monitor all three aspects in a more seamless way.
The recent changes to SEO mean that you should be focusing your efforts on:

• Building up your author rank
• Increasing the social signals your site sends to search engines
• Preparing for the semantic web and semantic search
• Link-building the right way
• Using keywords the right way with focus terms and synonyms

#1. Tools to track your author rank

Google and other search engines are constantly trying to control web spam. Their efforts spell good news for you and most of us who are engaged in building our online reputation. Google uses Google authorship among other signals to verify that you are a trusted source for information.

Most marketing blogs advise that the easiest way to increase your author rank is to write good quality content on great sites. That’s partially true. It’s interesting that currently your author rank is also loosely determined by the number of +1s and shares your content receives, your number of circlers, as well as your page rank, comments and authority on non-Google networks. As you can see, it also means how active you are on Google+. There is no evidence yet, that Google is using author rank to influence search results. Most experts are predicting that it will soon be included. The only tool right now that seems to measure all these factors is Virante’s author rank tool. It’s still in beta. Virantes author rank tool measures factors such as:

• Use of Google Authorship
• Diversity of sites to which an author contributes
• Link value of sites to which an author contributes
• Volume of content produced by author
• Link value of content produced by author

#2. Tools that monitor your social media analytics

Social signals are an important way for search engines to ensure that your content is of good quality. Social signals are getting to be almost as important as other traditional trust-building signals such as the number of inbound links that a site has accumulated. It’s also an important trust signal for visitors landing on a page. Currently, you need to pay for most social metrics tools.

I like to review the social media section of Google Analytics. It’s a free and easy way to check my social media activity. I also like the new Social Analytics tool in Moz Pro. You can add in your Facebook, Twitter and Google+ account. You have a dashboard where you can easily see the percentage of visits from social media including a traffic breakdown by network. My favorite tool to organize and schedule my social media content is Hootsuite. In addition to these tasks, Hootsuite digs into what your social media activity means with its own set of analytics tools. The company also recently partnered up with Brandwatch to extend the reach of its analytics, bringing it more in line with what enterprise customers would expect. Other social media analytics tools include Sprout Social and Social Report.

#3. Xml site-map generators

You’ve taken the time and effort to produce great content. It’s now important for search engines to find this content and index it. With schemas and structured data being the future of the web, all content on your site must be indexed with an xml site map. Google Webmasters even recognizes this as a critical issue. If you don’t have an xml sitemap for your site, besides indicating that as a critical issue, a red button allows you to add one, instantly.

Most good sitemap generators are paid but cost little. I use Sitemap Generator which is a free tool. Sitemap Writer Pro is good as well and only costs $25. XML Sitemap Inspector validates your sitemap, repairs errors, and pings all search engines.

#4. Link-building tools

Traditional inbound links are an important way for search engines to determine the relevancy of your content. Many people are talking about link-building losing its importance. What they mean is that spammy link-building methods are no longer relevant and can harm your site. Like getting links from link farms or buying other low-quality links. What still counts are links from trusted and high authority sites.

I love Moz’s Open Site Explorer. It allows you to enter a domain and view that domain’s backlinks. As a free user, you can only see detailed information (link anchor text, page authority, and domain authority) for the first five backlinks of a domain. Free users are limited to three reports per day.

#5. Keyword tools

Yes, keyword-stuffing is dead. Hummingbird looks for natural language queries, intent, variations of words and synonyms to determine relevancy. The keyword tools of the future will need to take into account these changes and provide you with a list of keywords and focus terms. I like Google’s keyword Planner and Inbound Writer. Both allow you to see a range of keywords and focus terms that will suit your document. Hit-tail is a paid tool but is good for finding long-tail queries.

Plugins for WordPress

#6. Great all-purpose plugin

WordPress SEO by Yoast is a good all-purpose SEO plugin for WordPress. It offers you mostly everything you need to optimize your site. Here are some of the nice features of WordPress SEO by Yoast:

• It helps you to write optimized content with built-in content analysis
• You can easily optimize your site’s titles and descriptions with the snippet preview.
• You can also automatically generate XML Sitemaps
• It automatically adds canonical tags to your posts

#7. Schema Creator Plugin for WordPress

Semantic web and structured data are the future of the web. Google, Bing, Yahoo! and other major search engines rely on structured data to present better search results, and they have endorsed schema.org as the proper markup vocabulary to use. Local businesses, customer reviews, medical information such as drug types, disease types, events are just some of the types of content that will largely benefit with structured data mark-up. The schema creator plugin for WordPress makes it easy to add schema.org microdata to pages and posts in WordPress.

#8. Plugin for in-depth articles

Google is now showing a special search result for selected searches that go deeper than usual into a subject, and which appear on the sites of trusted publishers. In-depth articles are a recommended technique for those authors who want to establish their expertise in a particular subject. These articles usually run between 1,250 to 2,500 words.
The In-Depth Articles Generator plugin, once installed in your WordPress blog or site, will automate the schema markup of any of your posts or pages with the Schema.org Article markup properties recommended by Google to qualify your content for its in-depth article search results feature.

#9. Google’s Publisher Plugin

Google announced just last week that they have a new plugin for publishers. It’s still in beta. The Google Publisher Plugin enables you to use Google’s products – including AdSense and Webmaster Tools.

#10. Plugin for setting up Google authorship for multi-author sites

Google authorship helps Google identify you as a verified author of the content you posted.
You can manually verify authorship. Several plugins help you to verify your authorship. What do you do if you are a multi-author blog?

The Google authorship plugin for multiple users is a simple solution. This plugin adds a new Google+ field to every user profile in the WordPress database. Your authors can copy-paste their profile link into that field. The plugin then automatically links back to the profile on every article they write, as defined by Google’s instructions.

Your Turn

Which SEO tools are you using to improve your site’s visibility? Please share in the comments below. We will all benefit from the info. Thanks.

Whether you are a blogger, content writer or copywriter, the right tools can save you time, money and effort. And we all know that the one thing content writers are short on is time. These tools are sure to make you more productive and will also give you an edge in writing SEO friendly posts.
I’ll share with you these content writing tools because they make my life a lot easier and I wish the same for you. I don’t know what I’d do without them. They are lifesavers when I’m in a hurry, on a deadline and need to finish that web page, whitepaper or post.
They are all free!
So here they are:

Writing Tools

All good content writers need tools of the trade – tools that will hone their writing skills or simply help them understand a word!
1. Thesaurus.com: is an essential tool in these days when Google thinks that you are a spammer if you use the same keyword more than a few times in a post! Thesaurus mercifully gives you synonyms and related terms. It’s great to write Hummingbird-friendly content as Hummingbird looks for synonyms and related terms to determine how relevant your article is to the user’s query.
2.Dictionary.com: an old favorite for looking up the meaning of a word.
3.Reference.com: I was writing content recently for a highly technical industry and reference.com was a huge help to me. Not only did I learn the meaning of essential terms, I also learned when they were used.
4. Yahoo style guide: There are many style guides online, Ap Stylebook and Chicago manual being two of the most popular. The Yahoo style guide used to be free and was an amazing reference. In 2013, they started selling it on Amazon and charging $10. AP Stylebook costs only $25 a year. You have other free style guides such as The National Geographic Style Manual and the Wikipedia Manual of Style.
5. Encylopedia.com is more like a search engine of many sources. It includes encyclopedias, dictionaries, and thesauruses with word origins, and abbreviations.
6. Factbrowser: is great for finding statistics and trends
7. Brainy quote is perfect for finding the right quote to spice up your post.
8. Purdue University’s OWL (Online Writing Lab): The Online Writing Lab (OWL) at Purdue University houses writing resources and instructional material that help with general writing skills, grammar and punctuation.
9. Writers workshop is a University of Illinois resource. It addresses common problems in writing such as dangling modifiers, homophones, run-on sentences and sentence fragments. A quick read of the workshop’s everyday grammar will strengthen your grammar and your writing abilities.

Image Editing Tools

10. Piktochart: is an easy-to-create application for infographics. What I like about them is that they have these quick 1-minute helpful videos that explain how to use it. You can add graphics, text, charts and customize them.
11. Easel.ly:is still in beta. It makes it easy to create infographics online.
You can select a theme, your objects and shapes, put in some text, and you can have a good-looking infographic in a short amount of time.
12. Infog.ram: You can create infographics and interactive online charts. It’s free and easy!
13. Greenshot: As I travel through the web, Greenshot allows me to easily capture anything on my screen. It even has a basic image editor. Of-course, I’m so used to Photoshop that I automatically edit my images in there.

SEO Tools

14. Keyword Planner: After Hummingbird, the main faux pas is keyword stuffing! But it’s still important to know the types of keywords that attract readers to your page. It’s more important to know a cluster of keywords than one single keyword. Even though Google has taken away their keyword tool, the keyword planner lets you plan keyword groups. Even though, it’s a tool meant for people using Adwords, it’s free and anyone can open an Adwords account.
15. Tag Crowd: You can create your own tag cloud from any text to visualize word frequency. Again this tool helps you to know what your post looks like to search engines with word clouds and word frequencies.
16. Inbound Writer: I like to use this tool to check if I have the right keywords or focus terms in my document.
17. WordPress SEO by Yoast: A very popular SEO tool for WordPress users. I use All in One SEO pack for WordPress. It lets me write the metadata for my post.
18. Content Experiments: is a great conversion testing tool. It’s right inside of Google Analytics which makes it easy to use for everyone that has a Google Analytics account. It allows you to increase the value of your existing websites and traffic, as you can test your site content and design. You can show several versions of a page to different visitors. Google Analytics measures the efficacy of each page version, and with a new advanced statistical engine, it determines the most effective version. If the user performs the action you want them to perform you know that you have hit upon your winning version of the page. It’s very effective in determining which copy works better.

Tools to Keep You on Schedule

19. Google Calendar: is a good time-management tool. You can use Google Calendar to schedule events, meetings, share your calendar, import, export or sync a calendar. You can also create tasks and to-do lists.
20. WordPress Editorial Calendar: I love this simple tool to plan my posts, at least for the month. Many content marketing professionals use their editorial calendars to plan content for the entire year.
21. Trello: I’ve used Trello to collaborate with others on projects. Since the basic tool is free, it’s ideal for small businesses or non-profits that need to coordinate content with multiple authors. Projects are represented by boards, which contain lists corresponding to tasks.
22. Evernote: is a great content curation tool. I like to use it to keep notes of everything that I see on the web that will help me with my future content writing.
23. Dropbox: Dropbox is a free service that allows you to store up to two gigabytes of data in a folder that resides on the company’s servers—and any other place you need it. The folder syncs to your computer, smartphone and other Web browser-equipped devices. There’s nothing to configure, and it’s surprisingly fast. You can use it to quickly sync files between your devices, and, since it’s available anywhere, it provides an easy way to get a hold of information on the go.
24. Hootsuite: You need to promote your content on different networks. At the same time, you don’t want to be a spammer by constantly promoting your own posts. I like to use Hootsuites schedule feature to schedule posts for different times. Buffer is also good for this purpose.
25. Add-ons for Gmail: Two add-ons for Gmail that help in efficiency. One is Boomerang – you can write an email now and schedule it to be sent automatically at your chosen time. You can also use Boomerang to take messages out of your inbox until you actually need them. Boomerang will archive the message. At the time you chose, it will be brought back to your inbox, marked unread, starred, or even at the top of your message list. There are times you need to make sure you follow up within a specific time frame after sending a message. You can select to only be reminded if nobody replies, or regardless.
Rapportive: is another useful add-on for Gmail. It shows you everything about your contacts, not only your gmail contacts but your Google+ contacts as well from right inside your inbox. You can immediately see what people look like, where they’re based, and what they do. You can establish rapport by mentioning shared interests. You can grow your network by connecting on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and more.

Your turn

Which are you favorite tools that help you write better, quicker or make you more productive? Please share them in the comments below. We’ll all benefit from the info. Thanks.