If you are going to be publishing content on your, the last thing you want to do is steal someone's pictures and use them without permission.
You could take your own pictures – but unless you are a photographer – you will probably want to find some pictures to liven up your web site.
When you upload a picture to WordPress, you can either link the picture to a larger version of itself, like the one to the right, you can not link it at all, or you can link it to another website – what is called “Custom URL”
Nofollow and Link Juice
If you are going to link to a website other than your own don't forget to go into the text editor on the right, top of your WordPress Page or Post editor and add the “nofollow” attribute to the HTML. It's really easy.
The code will look like this <img src=”yourimage.jpg”>
If you checked a box that says “Open link in new window” the code will look like this
<img src=”yourimage.jpg” target=”_blank” rel=”noopener”>
In either case, you need to add the nofollow so the code looks like this
<img src=”yourimage.jpg” target=”_blank” rel=”noopener nofollow”>
This keeps the search engines from taking “points” away from your sites importance because link juice is flowing out of your site. You want to nofollow all your links out of your web site – whether they are pictures or text links.
Public Domain Pictures
Some people think, just because they found it on Google Images search, it is free to use, when they state clearly that they may be subject to copyright.
In order to be sure the pictures you are using are free, you have to go to a site that has free “public domain” pictures available.
One of my favorite sites for pictures is Unsplash.com
I go there every day and I have found so many good pictures for this site there!
Some of my other favorites are
https://www.freeimages.com/
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
https://pixabay.com/
https://stocksnap.io/
https://kaboompics.com/
https://morguefile.com
https://publicdomainpictures.net/en/
Pictures for Your Affiliate Programs
If you are an affiliate and you are promoting a product or service and you need pictures – I would go to the affiliate page – most companies have an affiliate log-in with banners, statistics and sometimes other tools you can use for advertising.
Banners can be any size, square, rectangular, horizontal or vertical.
You have to read the rules of the company you are partnering with to see if you can edit the banners and use your own banners. Most are pretty lenient but check with your affiliate program!
Snagging or Snipping Pictures
Windows has this awesome tool called the Snipping tool – if you do a search for it on your computer you should find it in the System32 folder. I created a shortcut and pinned it to my task bar because I use the snipping tool several times a day!
Here is a link I made myself of a product on Amazon. I don't always put a “Caption” under the picture – this one does not look great – so I might remove the caption and edit the picture to have a built in caption if this were a post where I was trying to sell the product and not teach something about pictures, captions, etc.
I did a web search to see if Apple has a similar tool as Windows snipper and found this:
“Mac came out with a “snipping tool” app way, way before Windows ever did. OS X comes with an app called Grab (as in “screen grab”), in your Utilities folder. It will let you do screen shots with your mouse” ~Discussions on Apple
Also – if you want to take a screenshot of a whole page and share it easily – there is always
snag.gy
snapito.com – for snapshots of entire web pages
Editing Photos
I use Adobe PhotoShop – but I pay for the Creative Cloud from Adobe because I need it for my business – I write this off as a business expense because it is totally used for business.
If you are looking for a free photo editing program – try
https://pixlr.com/
https://www.freeonlinephotoeditor.com
https://ipiccy.com/
http://fotoflexer.com/
http://www.photocat.com/
I just made an animated GIF in photoshop and I think it came out pretty cool. Let me know what you think of it.
I used to do a lot of animated gifs when I first started designing websites… then I thought they were annoying so I stopped making them altogether.
I saw this banner Wealthy Affiliate puts out and I thought it would look better with some action.
If you have photo shop and want to make your own animated GIF – there are tons of tutorials on youtube.
Whenever I want to do something I don't know how to do – I look for youtube videos to show me how to get it done. Photo editing is no different.
Whichever photo editor you choose – there will be a learning curve where everything seems awkward in the new program. Don't give up. Look for instructions, either in youtube tutorials or in the software documentation.
HI Heather,
The Wealthy Affiliate animation was pretty cool, and I think they increase conversion because they are more eye-catching.
There are very useful resources here in this post, but I have one question. If I am promoting Amazon products, can I just take a screenshot of their products and post on my blog? Or should I first contact the product vendor and ask permission?
Thanks for your help!
Stefan
Hi Stefan – I’m glad you liked the Wealthy Affiliate banner. I agree that animation makes banners eye-catching!
As long as you are promoting the product on Amazon – you can use images from the page – at least that is what I understand from the Amazon Terms of Service
Hi Heather,
Love the article. It’s good to remind people that, just because an image is on the Internet, you can’t just snag it for your own website. I see a lot of people run afoul of that when they’re first starting out.
I also really liked the image of “link juice,” although I’d never heard that Google following links from your site to another site actually hurt your rankings. I know having that link would -help- the other site’s rankings, but I didn’t know it actually hurt your own. I’d be very interested in seeing any articles or references about that. I’ve only been using noindex and nofollow for content I didn’t want Google to index.
A lot of your favorite photo sites are mine as well. For editors, I also like GIMP. It’s probably overkill and too complicated for people who just want photo editing, but it’s a decent app for people who want a full featured graphics tool.
Thanks for all the great resources!
Hi Phil – I may be wrong – it’s been know to happen. 🙂
No one knows for sure how Google and other search engines calculate their algorithms and assign Page Rank.
I’ll tell you why I think you should nofollow every link that goes to a website that you get paid to have and any website except friends, family and other trusted sites – people you know.
In 2005 – Google came out with nofollow and they asked website designers to use it and not many took Google seriously. Most of our links were still dofollow. Then, Google had the Penguin “update” and they penalized a lot of sites for their links out that were nofollow if they went to paid or spammy sites — that’s how I remember it and I nofollow every link unless there is good reason not to nofollow. For example: it’s my site, a friend’s site or a close business associate. Even trading links with other sites and making them dofollow was punished in Penguin.
I just read about the subject of nofollow and watched a ton of videos by Google Webmasters and could not find a conclusive answer. I did find this.
I wonder that banners can slow down the site or not. I am just a newbie and I think using banners can come in handy for my blog. What do you think about this? Does it slow down the loading?
Most banners are just like a picture – size matters. Too many pictures and it can slow down load time. That’s why I use the plugin EWWW Image Optimizer – make sure you have it installed and activated. I would rather make a page visually pleasing and crunch the pictures than not use pictures (or banners)
wow I am so glad I found this post I have completely forgotten to no follow a couple of my links.
Thank you for the great information.
Best Regards
Jackie
Great! Glad to help!