7 Best Free Image Websites without Watermarks and More

How often have you felt the need of a really nice image for your blog but all you can find are stock images charging you 1.29$ or 3.99$ for a single image. You try and optimize images you already have and you put on a long face cursing the website for the outrageous prices and move on?

But you know, high resolution photographs and images are often a major requirement for a better web design, this has been said even by design experts like, Jacob Gube and Steven Snell

Codemakit presents to you the best of the best image websites hosting free images for your benefit, Images that do not have a grotesque watermark at the center, Images that do not need any attribution (some that allow you to use for commercial purposes too) and definitely no websites that charge you outrageous amounts for seemingly stupid images. These need no attribution (some might), are absolutely free and you are free to meddle with them (almost).

Codemakit has always tried to bring you a comparison of the best. Never has it presented its own opinions on its readers. Take the examples of the Top 8 form creation websites or A comparison of Free storage for your website or even the recent Best Office websites of 2014. When you see the top competitors (each offering a different approach) you connect with them and finally bookmark them.

Stock Free Images

Stock Free images by far contain one of the most vibrant collections of stock free images (Ahem). The images are free to download, displaying image size, and dimensions along with sharing options.

Free Images

Free images, A UK based website, too has a really nice collection of images from around the world. My advice to them is to start working on the SEO side of their website. Otherwise everything else is nice, mate!

UnProfound

Unprofound was started by Jim in 2001. Though his website has been attracting a lot of attention lately because of the sheer number and quality of images it hosts. But he still needs to work on his website.

Foter

Foter is by far the best website in terms of website design, and functionality. The landing page does not boast of overly beautiful images and sunset beach photos, but just a search bar where you need to type in your query and the engine would comply.

Morgue

Morgue file, though a small website with a little collection to offer is still workable as the pictures are of high quality and often meet the standards set by the webmasters. (p.s. It is the best website for photography students)

Public Domain Archive

Public domain archive is an altogether different website. A professionally designed website filled with a really beautiful High resolution images. Codemakit tried contacting Matt the founder of this project for an interview but couldn't get through. I guess I would have to post a public invitation (So Matt if you're reading this, you are invited for an interview with codemakit)

As is the custom, codemakit provides a complete comparison of all websites that have been studied in terms of functionality, web design and above all, content. Though the websites have been ranked, the readers not familiar with codemakit website rating (CWR) system can have a look at the rating document of Website Ratings.

Rank	Name	Download Available	Creative Commons	Free	Codemakit Index
1	Public Domain Archive	Yes	Yes	Yes	A2
2	Pixel Perfect Digital	NA	NA	NA	NA
3	Stock Free Images	Yes	NA	Yes	A3
4	Foter	Yes	Yes	Yes	B1
5	Free Images	Yes	NA	Yes	B2
6	Morguefile	Yes	Yes	Yes	B2
7	UnProfound	Yes	NA	Yes	C1

Update

Pixels

The website, Pixels provides photos licenced under Creative Commons Zero Licence. This means, you are free to download and use the images as you please. They have a huge collection of photos available in different sizes.

Large Photos

The website and its photos are mainly focused on commercial usage. But, don't fret yet, they're completely free to use. You can choose whether or not to attribute to the photos. However, as the name Large Photos suggests, the size of the photos can be pretty large.

Related reading,

• Photo Editor Online: Edit your images on the go, Learn how to edit your photographs and images online.
• Answer questions like, Why do Black and White images look awesome?
• Or questions like, What is the optimum number of images for a webpage?

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Simple Way to Convert excel tables to HTML

Many webmasters and bloggers not hailing from a web design back ground often feel the need to convert an excel file into html. But they want to achieve this feat without the unnecessary coding, hit-and-trials or head banging. 

One must admit, A method of converting an excel worksheet into its html counterpart is difficult. Owing to lack of options webmasters often resort to taking screenshot of the tables and inserting it as an image in the blog. Arguably, this is a great method to insert tables into a webpage, but it does not perform the job. The following are reasons why inserting table as an image is wrong.

1. It does not look good
2. Your readers cannot click
3. They cannot copy the text (for which, even codemakit method cannot help)
4. The image might perform weird in a mobile device
5. The text and the table prepared by you so meticulously will not be read by search engines* 
6. It shows lack of finesse in the blog

* You cannot just copy and paste the table text as alt txt in images, because large text in Alt-Text defies Blogger Policies.

So, looks like you're going to need HTML table. Now that I've established your need for HTML tables I shall present a solution.

First, open the table containing the spreadsheet. Save it as a .csv file.

* A .csv file is a comma separated values file, here the values are separated by commas, which makes it easier for online web applications to convert.

Next, go to http://www.tablesgenerator.com/html_tables

Click on file - Upload .csv File and Upload.

Now you'll be presented with a raw version of your html table. You can make modifications, change font type, size, justification, color, cell color etc.

Every update will be reflected at the newly created html-CSS file at the bottom of the page.

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War on Guest Blogging : Google VS The World

Matt Cutts, Google's Head of Spam recently took a bold step, claiming Guest Posts as a link building exercise thereby branding them as spam. Now the ball is in his court and he doesn't seem to mind penalizing many websites which resorted to Guest Blogging as an SEO exercise. 

He wrote a clear article on 'Why Guest Blogging is becoming worse'. He first gives an example of an unsolicited email asking permission to write an article for Matt's blog and then asking him to "do-follow a link or two". Finally Matt claims, quite rightly so, That often a beautiful and authentic SEO trend starts which is later duplicated by millions of people and this finally morphs into something grotesque.

After hearing this, many might recoil with horror. 

The Research

However, he later doles out some exceptions to Google’s wrath. He in his blog specifically mentions that high quality multi-author Blogs need not worry. To get to know about the topic better, I resorted to reading the comments section of the page. 

A person claimed that many of what Google had done made the lives of average site owners difficult, at this moment I thought to myself, the drastic step taken by Google actually helped small site owners. 

Larger site owners with exclusive contacts and deeper pockets often had reach towards content and SEO techniques from desperate people willing to share in exchange of some quality inbound links, A luxury ill afforded by people with lesser web presence. 

Matt's Response

Through Google’s guidelines (including the ones of blogger), deserving people with extraordinary stories and commendable content shall come into picture. Someone posted that, it looks as if Google is running our websites; it seems as if it is an intrusion into personal decisions. Matt's response too deserved applause, when he said that webmasters have always had the freedom to do whatever they chose. Same should be applicable to Google. It should be able to tweak its algorithm to provide quality user experience. As they always say, there are plenty of fish in the sea; you must remember that just Google has changed its algorithm and not the others. 

If you really want your page to be displayed in its search results, you will have to change with the trend (Never be a Potato Blogger). But with 69% of Search engine share hogged up by Google, It is tough to find other fishes in the sea. Another Question comes up, why now? Why didn't he tell sooner? Actually he has been posting videos depicting the wrong usage of guest blogging and its conversion into a link building SEO exercise. But, when the water went over the head, he had to take some serious steps.

What was really hilarious was when one comment highlighted a Guest Post hosted by Matt himself! Who later explained that he knew the guest pretty well and could vouch for her. But then again a Google algorithm can never determine if the webmaster vouches for the guest. All in all it is really a grey area. 

Still clarity can only be sought by keeping in mind the following points,

Create/implement a really tight filter on which guest posts to accept. In short publish only the best of Guest posts.

Wordstream.com came up with a Really weird strategy, asking publishers to not label Guest posts as "Guest Post". Empirical evidence for its working is not available but this still makes sense.

Determine if the Guest post written is for your users or for the search engine. Does it rely on making relationships or bringing back traffic?

If you still need clarity to know if a guest post is spammy, you can have a look at a previous article of ours which outlined 7 Ways to find if a Guest Post is bad.

So the obvious question, Is Guest Blogging Really DEAD?

The answer though really contentious, can be "no". Many comments at Matt's blog too agree and certain really influential (like Search Engine Journal or Marketing Land) websites too accede that Guest blogging isn't dead. If it was, Google would have announced a new update with another endangered animal name. Just the spammy ones or the ones which actually rely on guest blogging to bring traffic. Or rely on Paid links/Articles to create content and links.

Update:

To get further clarity, I posted a question at Google webmaster forums on whether interviews too come under Guest Post Category (Considering Codemakit conducts interviews with prominent and influential personalities). 

The people there were really helpful and after arguing for quite a long time, they succeeded in influencing my thoughts. One of the contributors that really inspired me explained it like this, 

Is the link there for users, or search engines? If the link is there for users, you can no-follow the link and users will never know, they will still click on it if it useful for them and provide traffic to the outgoing site. If the links are for search engines, it's an unnatural link and you could be penalized for it.

Hear Hear,

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7 Ways to check if a guest post is bad

Matt Cutts in his recent post took out all his artillery and beat down on Guest posts warning or so to say cautioning publishers and webmasters to stop using Guest posts as a link building exercise (Though he Himself used it). The Article was a real marvel but what it lacked were clear instructions. 

He reminded web owners that the websites with high quality guest articles would be exempt. But, there is no tangibility towards High Quality. 

What if the article is of better quality or of good quality? So here are some instructions for webmasters to determine if they should allow a guest post on their blog or not.

Tight Filter

First enforce a really tight filter on which guest posts to accept. 

In short publish only the best of Guest posts. When you target the best, you might not come under Matt's Purview.

Think and Label

Wordstream.com came up with a really weird strategy, asking publishers to not label Guest posts as "Guest Post". Empirical evidence for its working is not available but logically, it still makes sense.

Article or the Link

Any Webmaster aiming to be one of the top players of the internet world knows that External links and Internal Links play a pivotal role in determining the PageRank of the website. 

So site owners write guest posts for high page rank websites. Not for the information but for the links. But does the article you receive rely on making relationships or bringing back traffic? 

Ball-park a topic, 

If yours is not a personal blog, it is understood that the articles posted would be pertaining to a single topic or revolve around a topic. If tomorrow you receive a mail saying how awesome your site is or how amazed they are with your blog and would like to add something to it, ask them what they are writing on. If it’s a topic away from yours, decline respectfully.

Ctrl+C, 

This one is an understood one, If someone offers you some text for publication you would first check if it has not been plagiarized (You know there are some pretty good blogs around there). Simple steps to check are taking a snippet and Google it. For a more detailed method you can check out this Duplicate Content tool.

Check the content, 

The information sent by them should be synonymous with your website's content. It should cater to Google's Quality Guidelines. If you use blogger, it should be conducive to Blogger's content policy. All the more it should not try to pull visitors away from your website (Might be selfish). It should not promote itself; rather it should just provide quality information. Grammatical and semantic errors should also be checked.

The Thumb Rule,

One comment at Matt's Blog always inspires me. It said, "Before you agree to post some one's article on your blog, try and answer this question, Was the article written for your readers or for a search engine". I feel this point will always help you when you're confused.

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Do Pages with questions as title receive more clicks (Part 2)

This article is the complete study conducted by codemakit Website Research. If you feel that the contents are too technical for you, you may want to read the simplified summary presented at part I of the article first. Based on the data obtained from 190 Web Pages and their page views, the following observations were found.

The data available were the number of views, and the date of publication of page. Since the pages were linearly published (i.e. one page after another), the difference of the number of days were found and Cumulative number of days were found. Cumulative number of days helped in determining the number of days a webpage was present on the website as published. As a page's page views and the number of published days are directly proportional. 

The Data Set

The complete Data Set containing information in pdf for all the blog posts is available for perusal here. To probe this even further, Consider Page A has 200 page views and Page B has 20. This cannot be called as the complete indicator of the actual worth of the page, As Page A might have been published a year ago and Page B just a week ago. Hence a balanced base is needed to determine whether a webpage is performing well or not.

V/D ratio was found out. The V/D ratio is the ratio of the number of page views per unit cumulative day. The ratio is a perfect indicator of the number of how well did the page do in terms of garnering visitors. Using V/D ratio the index for page A would be (200 page views/365 days) and for page B as (20 page views /7 days). The ratio for Page A comes to be 0.548 and for Page B comes to be 2.85. The page A which at first looked better in comparison to Page B, now doesn't look worthy at all. Hence a normalized base would help in determining the true worth of a page.

Types of Webpages

The complete analysis was done using V/D ratio. Graphically, V/D = 0.2 was obtained as the value to be used for determining if a webpage performed well or not. Complete Data was divided into three parts 

1. The lesser ones,

Now all Web Pages which had a V/D ratio less than 0.2 can be safely said to perform worse than its counterparts. Hence all Web Pages with a V/D ratio less than 0.2 come under its purview. There were 53 lesser ones.

2. The Greater Ones

Just like the name suggests, all the Web Pages with a V/D ratio more than 0.2 were called as the greater ones or the ones that performed better. There were 123 Greater ones.

3. The questions

Each webpage which contains a question in its title text is a question type webpage. There existed 63 question type Web Pages on the said website.

How did we arrive at V/D=0.2 ?

Note. It must first be understood how the value of 0.2 was obtained. The complete analysis being a really simple one, It was thought that the sample could be plotted on the graph based on its frequency. The graph was then created taking V/D ratio on the abscissa and the frequency at ordinate. 

The resultant graph was a sharp bell shaped curve. The sharpness was due to excessive variations among the sample group with different number of Web Pages having inordinate differences in their V/D ratios. Hence, The Graph was then magnified at its peak in the hopes of arriving at the dividing value. This graphically came near 0.2.

The Observations

Summarily, It was found that, The Webpages with questions as their title text that performed poorly was 21.21%. However, The Webpages/Articles/Blog Post with questions as their title text which performed poorly was just 21.21%. In Short, if you put your title text as a question for any webpage, you have 50% more chances of making it more famous. 

			Greater Ones	Lesser Ones
		Total Number of WebPages	123	66
		Number of Webpages with Questions	39	14
		Percentage of Webpages with questions	31.71	21.21

Disclaimer for the study, 

It is however pertinent to note that, the study took 197 webpages and had to exclude some to maintain the sample's integrity. The study was conducted on a single type of website with a single Page Rank and hence same results cannot be expected for any other.

The study could be extended to cover other types of websites too. These could be analysed and results displayed. Also, one must understand that the criterion for determining if a webpage performed good or poor, was created based on the overall performance of the website itself. Hence, there exists a need for determining independent criteria for websites of different types, page ranks and visitor interaction.

Also, you can bring people to your webpage, but making them stay there is wholly dependent on how you present the content. Bounce rate isn't too irrelevant you know.

Is the Study too technical for you?

For a much simpler version of this study you can visit the part I of the series. 

If you still have doubts or would like to share your own story, comment below, we'll be happy to answer.

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Do Pages with questions as title receive more clicks (Part 1)

There exists a very contended view that, If you write an article with a question as its headline or title, it will receive more clicks and the webpage as a whole would be more successful. 

codemakit in the past has published material on improving the readership of any blog like, using specific publishing schedule, controlling Spam, creating apps, organising your blog content etc.

Though some are of the opinion that it plays no part in determining the popularity of an article. However, Online marketing experts disagree, Several studies claim an increase of 100% (Though there are several more probable methods of doubling your website traffic) traffic to the website, i.e. "Double Your Traffic!", some claim a modest 10% increase.

The truth isn't inaccessible, its just hidden. Gregory Ciotti, who oversees marketing at Help Scout and is the founder at Sparring Mind, believes, there exists an information Gap Theory based on a paper by George Loewenstein, on "The psychology of Curiosity: A Review and Reinterpretation" 

The Online marketing geniuses often claim that once a person glances on the headline, She/he frames their question as per the one displayed. For example, You need to know how to plant a eucalyptus tree in your backyard. You put the search term as "Plant a big eucalyptus tree". Suppose you stumble upon the headline, "How do you plant a large tree", though the queries are different enough, you must understand that the person finds it irresistible not to merge the two and experience that Aha! moment where you feel "That is just the damn thing I was searching for! How cool is that, I must check this out!"

Codemakit Website Research performed a study and analyzed Web Pages to answer this question. Since the study can prove to be too technical for some, It has been included in the second part of the article.

In the study, We took 197 Web Pages and collected just two information from them, Their number of Page views and the number of days they had been public on the web. We divided the complete set into three parts. 

1. One was the Greater ones or the ones that performed really great. 
2. Second was the lesser ones, i.e. those that did not perform up to the mark. 
3. Third set consisted of those which contained questions as their headlines. 

You can take a look at part II of the article if you want to know how did we divide the articles/blog posts into good and bad (complete Data Set containing information in pdf format for is available for perusal here). Once that was achieved, We analyzed and are now presenting our findings. 

Read carefully, The Web Pages which performed really good had 31% of them as questions. However, The ones that performed really bad had 21% as questions. In short your webpage has 50% more chances of performing good if it has a question as its title/ headline. 

For more information on the study you can visit the part II of the series. If you still have doubts or would like to share your own story, comment below, we'll be happy to answer.

But, Don't you wanna know how did we arrive at this conclusion?

Check out the second part of the series. 

Also, tell us how much better did your website perform?

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Why is it wrong to start a "popular at the moment" blog?

Bloggers are of many types, Some are the argumentative type and some are stickers, but recently one more type of blogger has crept up. The opportunist Blogger. Such people are not a rare sight on the web nowadays. 

Their creations are not hard to miss. Even you might have seen some of their creations. Okay lets see, a blog on the recent chess tournament, or on certain hot political topics, or on current trends, infamous actors, musicians, or famous personalities, award functions, high profile parties and even viral videos.

The opportunist blogger seems to find the most intriguing and the most happening idea at present and converts it into a highly talked about website with a lot of agglomerated content from different sources. One more thing worth noting about opportunist blogger is that their websites might, at one point of time, be swarming with visitors, filled with seemingly unending comments and discussions. Little do people know the PERILS OF BEING AN OPPORTUNISTIC BLOGGER!!

The Process

Let us first see the process of Opportunistic blogging. A person (The opportunistic Blogger) sees a trending topic. Lots of users discuss about the topic and forums are filled up with discussions on why one side is better than the other. The blogger takes up the topic, Finds and collects as much information as he/she could and spends the rest of the day churning the information.He then spends the rest of two days preparing the blog and publishing the information so produced. Then it is just simple work of maintaining the blog with small pieces of gossip that he finds in the foreseeable future. He does not care for a blog posting schedule, or what would happen if he stops the posts, just because he/she has the content, he thinks he can enslave the search engines and control the flow of visitors.

The Brighter Side

Let us see the bright side of Opportunistic Blogging, The person receives a lot of visitors during the time the trend is hot. The sudden surge of visitors often surpass the number of visitors a well to do blog manages to sustain. The blog becomes one of the most talked topics on the web (Of-course after the phenomenon it was made on). The blog manages to gain visitors in six digits with bounce rate as low as 25%. It garners back-links from the most respectable of websites and gains the trust of most cautious of webmasters.

After the advantages, I bet you must be feeling nauseated and green with envy, I felt it myself as we spent hours working on topics churning concepts, creating beautiful and marketable designs, but he takes all the credit? Why? 

The Dark Side

Webmasters, control your heat, cause here comes a string of disadvantages. A popular at the moment blog as the name suggests, is just popular at the moment. There comes a time when the water dries off and the merriment comes to an end. Since the popularity has been diminished why would someone in their right mind would want to come at such a blog.

In simple words, the blog would have lost nearly all his visitors. Bounce rates would first increase of-course (As people would come to revive a dying trend but would return due to lack of content) but then the values wouldn't matter. Pages per visit would decrease to 1 or zero and then the blog (after a long struggle) could have said to finally rest in peace. What use would such a blog cater, when the fame is short-lived? 

"What is glory if not eternal?"

The missed call

How ever there are moments in internet history when a blogger does not have the time to capitalize on the situation. This situation can be known as the "missed peak" situation. This is because by the time, blog is prepared and made, peak has ready passed, public interest has already reduced. It is worth noting that sometimes blogger do gain some advantage from the peak by forecasting the peak in advance, but that is not common and hence cannot be replicated by most.

Consider the case of a very popular Indian Song "Kolaveri Di", The song was released two weeks prior to its actual release and became a hit instantly. Take a look at the graph from Google trends. It is conspicuous from the graph that it was next to impossible for a regular blogger to capitalize on the situation. A potato blogger however, would obviously miss the peak.

So, when should you start a popular at the moment blog? When you are looking at a trend which you know would die. When you are looking for some quick money and quicker fame. Now, when you decide and know the risks, you can go an buy a domain for 3 months, 6 if you're optimistic and just crack-on.

Top Image Credit VR Marketing Blog

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