When creating blog posts, it is sometimes useful to include a photo, graphic or other visual enhancement to make the blog post more interesting. In addition, when the blog post is shared on other social media such as Facebook, the image is usually included with the post as shown in the example below:
Personal photos to illustrate your blog post are good because you own the copyright. You can use other photos as long as you consider the intellectual property rights of the owner. If you want to protect your photos so that they will not be used without acknowledgement by others, you might want to consider adding a watermark on each photo as shown below:
Below are a number of professional resources that you can consider using as a source of images. The first two sources allow free use of their images as long as there is an acknowledgement of the source on the webpage or blog post where the image appears. IStockPhoto.com adds a watermark to each displayed photo and requires a small fee ($1-2/ image) to obtain a watermark free photo.
Make sure that you understand the terms of use for each image that you decide to include on your blog.
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Favicon Generator
There are web based utilites that will provide a means to create a favicon from a larger size image. Here is a link to one such utility.
http://tools.dynamicdrive.com/favicon/
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Adding Meta tags to Your Blog
Adding meta tags is very important if you want to get some good traffic from search engines like Google.com, Yahoo.com, Bing.com, etc,especially the meta description part is the most important one.
If you don't know what meta tags are, meta tags are the tags which describes your site and tells the search engines what your site is all about. Adding meta tags is an important factor in Organic Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Meta tags allows search engines to index your web pages more accurately. In other words, meta tags communicate with the search engines and tells more information about your site and make your webpages index correctly and accurately.
Here is an example. This is what I got when I typed 'Blogger Tricks' in the Google Search Engine.
Here is a link to an article that describes how to add meta tags (title, description, author) to your blogger.com blog. Additional Blogger Templates
There are many sources for additional blogger templates. Here is a useful link to obtain some of these free resources.
