12+ Finest Free Stock Photos Sites for Blogs or Websites in 2019

Having an attractive image in your website or blog post can grab the attention of the audience.

This can make a great change to how your viewers respond to your WordPress website. Well, it is certain that the content is king but displaying eye-catching photographs surely add value to increase the number of frequent visitors you receive, and eventually lead your website to attain its goals in a better way.

But the problem starts while finding the good photos that can give your website the X-factor can be hard. In this article, we have tried to make your journey easier by making the list of the some best free and top stock photography websites.

There are many free stock photo websites that will quickly and easily allow downloading a high-quality image and help blogger or small business that needs occasional photographs for WordPress website content. So, let’s have a look over our list of some finest resources.

1. Unsplash:

 It is a website dedicated to sharing stock photography which allows upload photos to its website. It is then curated by a team of professional and experienced photo editors.

It has over 110,000 contributing photographers and generates more than billions of photo impressions per month and having their growing library of photos.

2. Pixabay:

Pixabay is an international website for sharing beautiful photos, illustrations all around the world. Founded in 2011 now emerged out having a personal image collection into an interactive online community, with this it supports 20 languages.

It is having stunning free images having 1.6 million royalty free stock photos and videos.

3. PicJumbo

With this, you can download beautiful stock photos and images in high resolutions for personal and commercial use.

Picjumbo has a lot of categories from technology to animals, fashion, foods etc.

4. RawPixel

With RawPixel you can get creative, with safe to use royalty free stock images, vectors and public domain illustrations. It gives options to download for commercial use for free and premium.

5. PikWizard

PikWizard is stock photo game, and some bloggers cite it as a well-kept secret and new player in this game.

These websites have more than 30,000+ completely free images, many of which are exclusive. The images of PikWizard are licensed under Creative Commons zero consist of nature shots, photographs of people as well as of desktop wallpapers.

By mouse over on images, you can see options to download, edit etc.

6. Shutterstock

It provides ample option of stock photography, stock footage, stock music, editing tools and also maintains a library of around 200 million royalty-free stock photos, vector graphics, and illustrations.

Shutterstock has over 100,000+ contributors with an "active customer base of more than 1.5 million people in 150 countries.

7. Pexels

Pexels includes hundreds of thousands of photos, but it really takes the favourite spot on many bloggers. Because the images they have are just beautiful and decent.

The photos they use are especially useful for the business and technical side of people.

8. Stocksnap

Stocksnap includes hundreds of latest images weekly and regular intervals and they have a great search tool to help you quickly find specific photos based on the keywords.

9. Wikimedia Commons

From the name you might have guessed; it is Wikipedia’s online repository for all the photos they use. That means there is a photo for almost anything you might be looking for.

10. Burst (by Shopify)

Burst is a free stock photo platform that is managed by Shopify. The photographers of this website are frequently shooting and uploading high-resolution images to help others the world around to look for latest and trending images.

11. FoodiesFeed

It is the best resource present on the internet which is highly visually appealing especially for free food photos in high resolution.

12. Kaboompics

Kaboompics is one of its type and most widespread source of free images for lifestyle, interior designs and used by specialized bloggers.

Every month, almost over 70,000 people from 209 countries visit Kaboompics. Their image appears on sites like BBC, CNN, Forbes, Cosmopolitan, Yahoo, iSpot, BuzzFeed, Hubspot and many more.

Besides of these, there are many other free images stock WordPress website present, which can help us to look for latest and trending images some of them are:

FreeImages, FreePhotos, FreeStocks, Gratisography, IM Free, Jay Mantri, Life of Pix, Moose, ShotStash, ScatterJar and many more.

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4 Useful Tips to Improve SEO Ranking of Your Videos

At first glance, it may seem as though improving the SEO for videos that you publish on your blog is difficult. In some ways that are true, especially seeing as search engines can’t actually ‘watch’ videos and determine what they are about.

Despite that there are several useful ways that you can improve the SEO of your videos and provide search engines with more information about them:

Publish the video transcript near the video:

Transcribing the audio in your video and then publishing it will give search engines written content that they can use to understand your video better. If you want you can manually transcribe the video or use automated transcription tools to help.

In either case, it is best to publish the transcript near the video – ideally right below it. If you’re concerned that will disrupt the layout of your website, you could insert it in a collapsible HTML element.

Optimize the page speed of the webpage

As you add videos to your blog you should track the page speed and optimize them as necessary. If you aren’t carefully videos can have a significant impact on the page speed, which will affect your rankings on search engines.

Some of the factors that can affect the page speed include self-hosting videos or setting them to autoplay. In some cases, you may need to optimize other elements on your webpage to improve the page speed after you publish videos.

Add in video schema markup

Video schema markup will help provide search engines with lots of relevant information about your video. Some of the details that you can include are the title, description, duration, upload date, and view count.

On top of that, you will be able to assign a custom thumbnail to your video using schema markup as well. That can help to improve the clickthrough rate of your video when it is listed on search engines, which will both improve your SEO and its overall impact.

Make sure the video is mobile-friendly

Search engines place a lot of importance on how mobile-friendly websites are, and your video SEO should factor that in. The web design and video player should be responsive, and you may want to create versions of the video in different resolutions to cater to some mobile devices.

For example, you could use Movavi Video Converter as an HD video converter to ensure that your videos are in the resolutions (and formats) that you require.

Each of the tips listed above can have a big impact on your video SEO and it is crucial that you take steps to improve them. If you do the videos that you publish on your blogs should get listed faster, rank better, and have enhanced listings too.

It should be noted that there are lots of other steps that you should take if you want to truly scale the rankings of search engines. That being said these tips can help give you a solid foundation that you can start with.

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30+ Facts That Proved Why You Should Choose WordPress in 2019

Do you know what’s common between Mashable, Laughing Squid, and BuzzMachine, apart from the fact that all are top-ranking blog sites?

Each one of these uses WordPress. And so do 32.5% of all websites on the internet.

So if you are looking for a content management system for your new site, you should perhaps look no further than WordPress. If one-third of the internet is using WordPress, it must be really good.

But what makes WordPress so popular in the first place?

Well, there are many reasons. For starters, you don’t have to pay a dime to use the WordPress software. Anyone can download it from WordPress.org and start using it straight away--no questions asked.

The most amazing thing about WordPress is that you can install it, customize your site, and add new features without learning any coding or hiring an expensive developer.

Installing WordPress is a cinch. Most hosts today offer one-click WordPress installation to users. And in case you plan to use WordPress.com, a commercial blog hosting service provider, you’ll get WordPress pre-installed.

Similarly, adding new features to your WordPress site is ridiculously easy. At a press of a button, you can enable advanced features on your site by installing relevant plugins and improve your site’s performance and boost customer experience.

For instance, a fast loading site is crucial for delivering a satisfying browsing or online shopping experience to customers. There are WordPress plugins available, some even completely free, that help you load your site faster. One such plugin is WP Super Cache, which is the 6th most popular WordPress plugin, having been downloaded 3.9 million times.

Additionally, you can easily and quickly customize the look and layout of your WordPress site in any way you want. All you have to do is upload an appropriate WordPress theme. Just like plugins, some themes don’t cost a thing while some others ask you to pay a one-time subscription fee.

With so many advantages on offer, there’s no wonder millions of people love using WordPress. To know more about this pioneering content management system, have a look at this facts-packed infographic.

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Building Secure, Mobile & Search Engine Friendly Websites in 2019

Only having a website on Wordpress is not going to add any value for better returns. Your Website must be optimized and beautiful to enhance its attractiveness. Why you must take care more to it let’s have a look.

So, guess how many blog posts people do publish every day.

Any ideas?

Well, it is estimated that Word Press users alone publish more than 2 million posts every day. That comes out to be 25 blog posts every second. So where is our website get the chance in the queue of many? So to stand out of the crowd of millions of the website your website must be best. Not a surprise that millions of users search the term “SEO” on Google daily.

But what does SEO even mean?

Definition: According to Wikipedia, SEO is 

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of affecting the online visibility of a website or a web page in a web search engine's unpaid results

In Simple language, you can assume SEO as Optimizing your site & following Search Engine's Requirements to rank your site organically higher in the Search Engine Results.

Search Engine like Google checks 100's of Factors to rank your site from Content to Authority of the Site. From Backlinks to Spam history of your site everything will be checked before your site is indexed higher in their pages.

If you come across the below problem, it’s alarming as:

• Your site is not getting proper ranking in search terms of the engines.
• You are not able to find potential customers.
• In many cases, a not well-designed site could be the cause of the drop in the ranking of your WordPress site.

If you are very new in Blogging The Follow this Guide: How to Create a Blog and Earn Money for Living

What is an SEO friendly website?

A website which is well designed and developed by using SEO strategies design layout and website coding. The best website SEO sociability is when all of the following basics are taken care:

1. Marketing strategy and Keyword research
2. On-page and off-page SEO and SEO coding
3. Local SEO and citations
4. How engagement going on social media
5. Quality of the Content and Reputation.
6. Content should be unique and good.
7. Improve Authority of the site by organic backlinks
8. Optimizing images (Adding relevant ALT, Title tags to the images and using compressed images)
9. Optimizing your robots.txt file.
10. Reducing the Bounce rate.
11. The number of Ads should be less the content area. (Bad user experience)
12. Mobile First Blog or Site (Use Responsive Templates and themes)

Check This Guide for Off-page and On-page SEO Optimization Techniques

Viewing the website well on a phone and tablet is becoming the need of time. Nowadays, most people use the word press websites on mobile and which are going to increase day by day.  There are many WordPress plugins present; which are free of cost that can be used to make your website mobile friendly.

Best plugins to Build SEO Friendly Sites: 

Always install plugins that are frequently updated and have good authority (To check authority please check the total installs and Ratings). I'm sharing only the top SEO Plugins which are at a peak in terms of  Downloads and Features.

These two plugins have similar features but The Yoast plugin has a little edge over the All in One SEO pack in dealing and avoiding duplicate content issue by Setting canonical URLs. 

• Yoast SEO
• All in One SEO

Some of the mobile-friendly plugins are given below:

• WPTOUCH
• AMP
• TOUCHY
• SUPERFLY

Steps to make your website secure:

• You can secure your WordPress website by guarding the login page and preventing brute force attacks
• Setup a website lockdown feature so you get notified of this unauthorized activity.
• Well with Use of 2-factor authentication on the login page is also a good security measure.
• Applying an SSL (Secure Socket Layer) certificate is one of the best moves to secure the admin panel. 
• Adjust your password strength by adding uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers, and special characters. 

By implementing all the above steps you can be on the long term race to be among the best of the website to bring better output. So that way, next time your word press website being visited it will be responsive, optimized and friendly, but content will be accessible in the blink of an eye!

Always Update Plugins, Themes and follow the latest practices in web developing to keep your site Secure, beautiful, SEO And Mobile Friendly.

Hope you like this article, Don't forget to share which plugins your are using to optimize your site in the comments section below.

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Ultimate Guide: Learn WordPress Duplicate Content And Its Types

Wordpress Content Description:

When we talk about blogging one thing that will come first in our thoughts is WordPress, it has the hold as best Content Management System title undisputedly. It manages the optimization for websites as its SEO optimized. with 100's of plugins.

Organic Search engines like Google, Yahoo etc. gives more traffic to Wordpress as it has the potential of becoming SEO friendly by correctly configuring it, It has such vast support for Third party plugins like Yoast, jetpack, All in one SEO etc. Hence so it manages the contents for blogs very well, but we know it’s the content at last which matters. Content is the King, so we must give priority to the content of the blog we dealing with.

There is a problem of content duplicity which kills the quality of your website, and hence, here in this article, we will discuss how to deal with this problem.

So get ready for a drive for our smooth ride with our blog to win the race against duplicity.

What is duplicate content?

Generally, duplicate content can be defined as content which could be accessed by multiple URLs of websites or blogs, which spoils content efficiency.

 Due to this the visitor are not able to get quality content. Added on the pages with little to no content are also considered to be duplicate content.

There are multiple problems that can occur due to the presence of the Duplicate Content:

1. Duplicate content makes less or no value for your visitors and puzzles search engines.
2. SEO performance is harmed by the presence of it.
3. Duplicate content decreases the ranking and performance of the website or blog during the search.
4. It can be caused by technical mishaps and manually copied content. 

Blogs with duplicate content can be penalized by Google. Yes, you heard it right Manual Actions From Google.

What actually is a Manual Action?

According To Google when a Human Reviewer at Google reviewed a blog/site and they found the site doesn't compliant with Google's webmaster quality guidelines and it is just trying to trick the search engines to manipulate the search Index.

What happened when Manual Action strikes on our blog?

The first thing you will not be knowing whether your blog is stricken by Manual Action. because Google told in this article they can lower your blog ranking without notifying or indicating user.

How To Know Whether the Blog is Penalized?

1. You can get the notification if you register your blog in Google Webmaster Tools.
In the Manual Action Section, you will find whether your blog is hit by a manual action or not.

2. The sudden drop in organic traffic can also be the cause of Manual Action. Register your site in Google Analytics then weekly check how much is your traffic? Check for a sudden drop in traffic.

Which Manual Action is for Duplicate Content?

Google Have classified Manual Actions based on the user actions to manipulate search engine to achieve their desires.

Google has more than 10 types of Manual Actions but for the duplicate content which contains no weight. it has Thin content with little or no added value Manual Action.

What Google has to say about this please check:

Types of duplicate content:

These are the Types of duplicate content that we come across are discussed below:

Scraped content:

The Scraped content can be defined as content which is not original on a site and has been copied.

These can be copied from some another website without permission of the owner of the website. Google may be sometimes not abler to tell difference between both of the original and the copy, so it's often the site owner's task to be on the lookout for scrapers.

As we know it adds no benefit to the ranking. The content owner must know; what to do if their content gets stolen.

Syndicated content:

Syndicated content or syndication of the content is when it gets republished on some other third party website, but with the permission of the original piece's author.

Well as we know it’s a legal way to get your content in front of the new viewer to increase the audience base.

It's important to set some set of rules so that the third party publisher who is working with to make sure syndication doesn't turn out be a problematic issue for the website.

With the use of canonical tags, you can authenticate the originality of content.

HTTP and HTTPS pages:

This is a problem that occurs commonly when internal duplication problems are identical HTTP and HTTPS URLs on a site.

These issues arise when the switch to HTTPS isn't implemented with the thorough attention the process requires.

The most common circumstances when this occurs are:

This can happen if there are backlinks from other sites directing to HTTP pages, It happens because some internal links on your site still contain the old protocol, and the non-secure pages do not redirect visitors to the secure ones.

Similar content:

Most often completely identical content are thought of as duplicate content. But a chunk of very similar content also comes under it. Mostly when we write some kind of same stuff those are kind of identical like travelling same place etc. So we can merge those to eradicate this problem.
On blogs, similar content disputes may arise while updating the old content. In this situation, using a canonical link on the older article is the best solution.

Printer-friendly pages:

It happens as your site's pages have printer-friendly versions accessible which is accessed via separate URLs, it will be easy for Google to find and crawl those through internal links. As content on the page itself and its version which is printer friendly are going to be identical.

How Google find Duplicate content:

So now, this question might be in your head, how Google identify duplicate content. The answer is Crawlers.

In simple Crawlers is a set of instruction which is programmed to visit various sites over the internet. So, websites or specific pages can be selectively visited and indexed. Crawlers often called as spiderbots, got the name because it crawls through a site a page at a time.

In this way the crawler bots search your site, they will recognize the duplicacy of the site and so, it is indeed duplicate content.

Conclusion:

In this article, we learned about Duplicate Content in WordPress, Manual Action on Duplicate  Content by Google and How Search  Engines find duplicate content.

In the next article, I will explain you step by step how to fix the duplicate content issues. Hope all of you learned something useful from this tutorial. Please share this article on your social pages.

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