Introducing the "Free high-quality picture search" tool

Introducing the "Free high-quality picture search" tool

Pictures Searching

This article introduces the Free High Quality Picture Search tool which has been added to this website.

Today I've added a new feature to Blogger-Hints-and-Tips.

The Free High Quality Image Search tool is available from the menu bar. It is a tool to help you locate free, high-quality pictures to use in your blog posts or other website projects.

It is based on a Google-custom-search engine, and a carefully selected set of websites that offer images you can use for free on your blog, even if it is "commercial" (ie you have advertising or any other way of making money from it).

The difference between this and the images that you can get from a general-purpose search using the Creative Commons image and multi-media search tool is the resolution of the images that are found and/or their photographic quality.

How to use the Free-image-search tool

• Choose it from the menu bar on this blog, or navigate directly to it at  http://blogger-hints-and-tips.blogspot.ie/p/free-image-search.html

• Type a description of the image you want to see into the search-bar.

• Press Enter

• When the results display, click the Image tab, to see what photos are available.
  (Hopefully this step is only temporary, and I can soon manage to have the search-results default to images and still use the tool in Blogger.)

• Use the numbers in the lower-left side to move to different pages in the image-search results.

• Choose an image that you would like to use.

Once you have chosen an image, you can either link directly to if (if the site allows), or download a copy, put it on your own image-service (eg Picasa-web-albums), and use it in your blog.   The latter approach is required if you want the image to be used as the thumbnail for your post.

Copyright

By definition, all images returned by the search-tool should be free-use and so not subject to any copyright rules.

However some do have attribution requirements, and you may need to use image-captions or similar to make sure that these are followed in your blog.

Related Articles:

Finding free photos for your blog, using Creative Commons

Introducing Google-custom-search engines

Summarise your blog-post with post.snippet and post.thumbnail

Copyright, Blogs and Blogging, an introduction

Ditulis jackcode Pada 23.17.00 Komentar

Dealing with the "Keyword not provided" problem in your statistics

Dealing with the "Keyword not provided" problem in your statistics

Searching SEO Statistics Webmaster Tools

This article explains why the proportion of "keyword not provided" visits to most websites is increasing, and gives you options for finding out what keywords people are searching for when they reach your blog.

Why the percentage of not-provided search visits to your blog has increased

If SEO is important for your blog, and if you therefore watch the Stats > Traffic Sources tab in your Blogger dashboard or your Google Analytics results, you'll probably have seen that proportion of your search-visitors whose keyword is "not provided" has gone up a lot recently, to be more-or-less 100% of your Google search traffic.   (In the Blogger Stats tab "not provided" isn't shown - but the number of visits per keyword is now massively less than the vists from Google.)

This is no accident: Google is now witholding the keywords that people use, and (says that) this to protect your visitor's privacy. The issue has been widely discussed in sites like SearchEngineLand.

Opinions vary, but many people believe that

"Not knowing keywords has big implications if you use data about what people search for to decide how to develop your blog." [tweet this quote].

For example,   I publish listings of the contents of old (ie graphical copyright expired) song-books in a particular niche on one of my blogs.  There are far too many songs for me to load the full text or sheet music of all of them. And this is a niche with lots of competition:   there are a zillion websites distributing song-lyrics (most illegally).  But by watching the search-terms that led people to arrive at certain pages, I can identify particular songs that people were looking for and not finding anywhere else (the so called "long tail" of search keywords). If these songs are now in the public domain, I can make a dedicated page for them, and share what I know - in many cases after doing more research and pulling together information from a range of different sources.    Not knowing the keywords that people use to get to the book-listing pages would totally destroy this approach.

What you can do about it

So far I've identified three alternative options for getting data about what my visitors are searching for.

Ask for user-provided information

I've used Google Docs to make a data-collection form, and invited my visitors to use it to tell me about songs they are looking for.

The advantage is that I can ask them for richer information than just the keywords, eg where / when they remembmer it from, multiple snatches of the lyrics, what style the music is, etc.

But the disadvantage - and it's a big one - is that it only works for people who actually get to my site and then go into the other page where this form is kept, and fill in the form. I don't want to go into details - but let's just say that I haven't been run off my feet!

Get data from WebMaster Central

If you have verified your blog in Google Webmaster Tools, then the Search traffic > Search Queries tab shows the queries that have caused your blog to show up in search results pages, as well as how many times this has happened and what position, on average, you had in these pages.

This is richer information than you get from Analytics or Blogger-Stats, which only tell you about people who actually visited your blog.

But the disadvantages are that data is only kept for 90 days, and it only shows the top 2000 keywords.   Both of these are issues for me - some of my song-book contents are seasonal - if something is being looked for now, then the moment (week, month) may have passed by the time that I've noticed the trend, researched the song and written it up to a standard that I'm happy to publish. So really I want to checking the logs for nine months ago, so I can research things that are likely to be popular again next year.

Get data from AdWords

Advertising campaigns are the one place where Google is passing the search-keywords through to back-end systems. And because of this, Adwords does have data about what your visitors are searching for - provided you've set it up to collect this data. To get it up:

Firstly, sign up for an AdWords account. You probably have to deposit $10 into the account to get started - but you don't actually need to set up any advertising campaigns or spend any money after that.

Then link your AdWords account to your Google Webmaster Central account.

Once this is done, Adwords will start collecting the search-keywords for your blog. To get at the data:

• Log in to AdWords
• Select "All Online Campaigns,"
• Make an empty campaign (if you haven't got one already)
• Go to the "Dimensions" tab
• Change "View" to "Paid & organic".

AdWords will display your stats, since you signed up and linked your account. This includes the top search terms that users got to your site with, number of clicks, number of queries and some other measures too.

I'm only just starting to assess how well this will for for my song-listing site - will update this post when I have more specific information about how well it works and whether I can get actionable results from it.

What other alternatives have you found?

Leave a comment below, and I'll expand this list as we find out more options for accessing keyword-based search traffic information.

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Related Articles:

Using Google Docs to put a survey questionnaire into Blogger

Six reasons why SEO doesn't matter for your blog

Ditulis jackcode Pada 07.33.00 Komentar

How to find free pictures for your blog, using Creative-Commons search

How to find free pictures for your blog, using Creative-Commons search

Article Copyright Creative Commons Pictures Searching

This article describes the Creative Commons search tool, which you can use to look for pictures, videos, music etc that are available for other people to use under a Creative Commons license.

What is Creative Commons

Previously I've described how copyright applies to bloggers, how you can protect your blog-content from copyright theives, and what you can do if they take you work anyway.

The focus in that series was looking after your own rights.

But rights always come with responsibilities. The details vary by country, but in general you cannot just copy other people's recent work without their permission - in the same way that they cannot copy yours.

Some people, though, are happy to give other people permission to use their work, often with certain conditions (eg you must including an attribution link to the creator).

Creative Commons is an easy, legal way for creators to give permission for things they create to be used by other people. It is a framework which offers "licenses" that creators (writers, artists, composers, poets, etc) can apply to their work to say that other people can make copies, and what conditions apply  (eg non-commercial use, only if you attribute me, etc)

To use it, authors, artists, etc don't need to register their work. Instead, they go to the Creative Commons website and get code / text to put with their published work to show what rules apply.

Then they can publish or upload their pictures, writing etc anywhere they want, and by linking to the licence the work is as protected as anything on the internet can be.

How to find pictures & music that are Creative Commons licensed

Creative Commons have a very useful search tool, found at http://search.creativecommons.org

This is not a search engine. Instead it is a front-end-tool that lets you choose:

• The keywords you want to search for (the search words)
• The type of license that you need (use for commercial purposes - yes or no, modify, adapt, build upon - yes/no)
• Which of the file host/search services to use (eg flickr, Google, Open clip art library - etc)

Once you have entered the search options, click on the source that you want to look in, and you are  taken to that site and shown the results of the search-query and options you entered.

For example, when I entered:

• "Christmas"
• Commercial allowed (because I wanted to make a picture to use in Blogger-HAT, where I have advertising)
• Changes allowed (because I wanted an image that I could use as the basis for another one, rather than exactly as it is now)

and clicked on Fotopedia, I was shown:

From here I could use the search tools in Fotopedia to refine my image-search and find just the right picture that I could use to represent a Christmas carol worksheet on my blog.

What sources are included

Today, the sources that are linked to from Creative Commons search are:

• Eurpoeana - media
• Flickr - pictures
• Fotopedia - pictures
• Google web - web search results
• Google images - pictures
• Jamenda - music
• Open Clip Art Library - images
• SpinXpress - media
• Wikimedia Commons - media
• YouTube - video
• Pixabay - images
• ccMixter - music
• SoundCloud - music

It wouldn't surprise me if this list grow/shrinks, as sites become more or less useful as sources of public-domain or creative-commons-licensed materials.

Things to watch out for

Creative Commons cannot guarantee that the results of searches that start in their tools will always be available for re-use: source systems may change their approach, items may be mis-tagged, content owners may change their mind, etc. So they recommend that you should always click-through to the original image in the source site, and double-check the license and attribution requirements there.

Also, some sites may allow you to link directly to the copy of the image on their site. this can be a lot quicker than making your own copy, uploading it and included it in your blog.  But doing this means that the image will not be used as the thumbnail-image for your post. And if the picture is ever removed from the original site - or its web-site address there changes - then the link in your blog will not work any more.

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Related Articles:

Bloggers and Copyright - an overview

Protecting your blog-contents from copyright theft

Taking action when someone has used your copyright materials

Thumbnail images - a picture to summarise each post

Adding a picture to Blogger

Ditulis jackcode Pada 06.23.00 Komentar

Putting a custom +1 button into your blog

Putting a custom +1 button into your blog

+1 Article Searching SEO Social Networking ZZ - needs 2013 review

You can add a custom version of Google's +1 button to your blog, just like  Facebook's Like button.  It can go in under the title bar in the post-header or beside or below each post.  Or it can be a gadget.   And the "plus one" function can apply to  an individual post or your whole blog.   


[Updated Jul 2011 to link to the asynchronous version of the code.] 

What is Google's +1 button

+1 is Google's answer to Facebook's Like button - or at least that's what Google are hoping.

They first announced it in March 2011, and have now added it to the standard sharing buttons for Blogger.

The big difference between +1 and Like is where the results appear:

• Like shows up in counts in the Like button and inside Facebook in the feed from the person doing the liking.    
• +1 shows up in Google search results - it's still not clear if this is just in search results for your "friends" (however they're defined) or if it shows in search results for everyone, or how much influence it will have on search-result.  

Adding +1 if you don't use Blogger's standard sharing buttons

Provided you're willing to accept the disadvantages of editing your template, it's easy enough to add a customized Tweet or Facebook share button to your blog.

Adding a customised +1 button is very similar.   Just follow these steps:

1   Go to the +1 button configuration page Webmaster Central.

2   Choose the basic settings you want:  pick button size, annotation and language. 

So far, I've used the medium (20px) size, as it seems to fit best with the other share-items that I've added before.   You should be able to see it at the top of the page if you're reading this article through a web-browser.   Note that this option is slightly smaller than the default "standard" option.

Annotation is about how your number of +1s is "noted" in the button - choose the different options and watch what happens in the preview to see which one you want to use.  Or choose None if you don't want the button to show a count.

3  Click on Advanced options, and decide what you want to to apply the +1 function to:

• If you want to to put the +1 button where it can be used to on the individual post URL rather than your whole blog, then put some text like PUT-URL-HERE into the "Url to +1" box.   

• If you want readers to +1 your whole blog, just enter your blog's web-address (ie URL) into the "URL to +1" box.  
  (NB It may be possible to leave it blank in this case, but I'd rather specify exactly what URL to use, in case anyone hits +1 from an archive page or similar, which has a separate URL).

5   Copy the HTML shown.


The code provided is in two parts.  The first section is what you put into your blog whereever you want the +1 button to appear.   The second part starts with a comment:  "<!-- Place this tag after the last plusone tag -->".   This means that:

1. You only need to put the code underneath that line into your blog once, and 
2. The place to put it is immediately after the last time you put the +1 button code into your blog.  Iif you only add the button once, then put after that time.   

6   Add it to your blog in the same way that you would add add any other share-this-to-whatever social sharing button, except --- if you want the button to recommend individual posts not the whole blog, then before you save the change, replace the PUT-URL-HERE part of

href="PUT-URL-HERE"    (or whatever text you used)

  with

expr:href='data:post.url'

What your viewers will see:

Visitors who see your blog in their web-browser (not through an RSS feed reader) will see a new button wherever you choose to put it.   (People who read your blog thru feed aggregators, or by email subscription, won't see it.)


When someone clicks the button, what happens depends on whether they are logged in to a Google account at the time, and whether that Google account has a public profile.

I'm not even going to try describing all the options possible as yet (or this will never get published!) but you are welcome to try the one at the top of this article to see how it works

Later on, as the button starts to be used enough to provide meaningful data for Google, potential viewers who see you site listed in Google search results will start to see counts of the number of times that other people have "plus-one'd" you in their search results.

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Related Articles:



Putting a Share this to XXXX button onto your blog

Advantages and disadvantages of editing your template

Putting a "tweet this" button on your blog

Connecting your blog and the social networks

Understanding Google accounts

Ditulis jackcode Pada 04.25.00 Komentar

Custom Search Elements won't support iframe for much longer - change to new options now

Custom Search Elements won't support iframe for much longer - change to new options now

Article Google Custom Search Searching ZZ - needs 2013 review

This article is about changes made to Google's custom search engines made in June 2011, and the implications for Blogger users who have been using the iframe option to show search results inside their blogs.

Previously I've explained how to make a Google custom-search engine for your blog,  This is particularly useful for AdSense publihsers, because it lets them have a share of the revenue from the advertising displayed inside Google search results.

In June 2011, Google's Custom Search team announced some new options for displaying search results.  Overall these are a step forward, but they do include removing the "iframe" option which, until now, has been the only way that Blogger users who implemented a custom-search could display the search-results inside their blog.

As a result, Blogger users who used the CSE i-frame display option need to upgrade to one of the new displays.   This can be done now - it's not clear how much longer the iframe-based code will work for.

Also, Blogger users who don't currently have a custom-search in their blog but want to install one have some new options to choose from, as described in the New CSE Display Options.


What's happened for existing Custom Search Engines

If you already have a Custom Search Engine (CSE), you manage it  by logging in to the CSE control panel. If you have been using the iframe option and you go to the look-and-feel tab now, there is a new message like this:

It says:

Deprecation warning: The Iframe option is deprecated. We recommend the "Two page" or "Results only" layouts in the Search element as the new options. Please refer to our developer guide for a complete list of layout options.

"Depreciated" is web-developer speak for "we don't like this, and one day we will stop supporting it and wll do some new feature that makes it break".    In short, "we don't apprecaite this any more".

In short, the new message is saying that the iframe option will work for now, but you will need to change to use something else sooner or later.


New CSE results display options

Instead of the iframe option, Blogger users need to choose one of the options that are based on Google web-elements.   Choose Search-element under Hosting Options and you will be shown the new display options, which are:

• Full-width - The search box and search results take up the whole width of the place(post, page or gadget) where you put the Search element.

• Compact - Like the full-width option, this takes up the the entire width of the page or column, but the results section shows fewer results, so it takes up less vertical space. Google say that "this option is optimized for mobile devices, so it works well on Android, iPhone, or Palm webOS devices."

• Two Column - The search box and the search results section are in places in your webpage, and to leave the search results section, a user must click on the X icon next to the search box.

• Two Page - The search box and the search results are placed in two different places (posts, pages or gadgets).  In this option, the search results section also has search box, so visitors can submit further queries directly in the search results page.

• Results Only - Search results are shown in the place (post or gadget) where you put them - but Google CSE doesn't give you a search box, you need to make your own.

• Google-Hosted - CSE gives you the code for a search-box, and you put this into a post or gadget.  But then someone clicks search, they are taken to a Google-hosted webpage outside fo your blog, which can be opened either in the same window or in a new window.

Google have provided examples of each layout option.


How to install these into blogger

Follow these steps to choose one of the new display options, for either a new or existing Google Custom Search Element that is used in Blogger:

1)  From the Custom-Search-Elements, choose Control Panel, and then choose Look and Feel.

2)  Choose a layout option, by clicking on it.  The one you have selected is shown in a frame.

3)  Scroll to the bottom of the page, and click Save and Get Code

4) Install the code into your blog in the way specified by the option you chose:  some options have code for place where you want the search box and where you want the resutls, while others only have code for one of these.

How well do each of the options work with Blogger:

Full-width and Compact:

These options both display their results well inside blogger.   However the search-box is only shown on the same page as the results, so either

• You need to put the search-element into a gadget that is visible the whole time, or
• Searching your site becomes a two click process (on click to get to the search box, one to run the search), which will confuse some users.

But the search results look good - although the ads at the top blend very strongly into the results.

Two-column:
This option does not currently appear to work with Blogger (at least not when I tested it under Firefox 4 / MS Windows XP)

Two-page:
Inside Blogger, this appears very similar to the way that the iframe-results display worked:   to install the code, you need to say what page or post the results will appear on, and then you are given specific code to put into each of:

1. The place (gadget or page or post) where the search-box goes. and
2. The place (gadget, post or page) where the results go.

I haven't fully decided, but it's likely that this is the option I will use for the Blogger-Helpers-Search Tool.

Results only:

Again, inside Blogger, the results-only option is very similar to the Two-page option, with some key differences:

1. There is no search-query bar at the top of the place (post, page, gadet) where the results are displayed, and
2. You need to make your own search query form and to call the search from it.

It's very likely that I will use this option for several of my other blog-sites, where the search is always called from a gadget:   because the gadget will continue to be shown on the search results page, I don't need to put a search-form into the results.

NB  Having to make your own search-query may seem difficult, but there is a very simple way to do this, by using CSE itself to build the search-box code for you:

• Choose the two-page option
• Enter the URL of the post or page where you want the results to appear
• Click Save and get code
• Copy the code that you are told to install into where you'd like the search box to appear.
• Paste that code into the appropriate gadget, post or page
• Go back to the Look and Feel tab in CSE
• Choose the results-only option
• Click Save and get code
• Copy the code that you are told to install into where you'd like the results to appear.
• Paste that code into the gadget, post or page where you want to put the search results

Google-hosted
I have not investigated this option, because I want to have the search-results right inside my blog.

  

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Related Articles:

Putting a Google Search Engine into your blog

Setting up AdSense for your Blog

Blogger-Helpers-Search-Tool - a customised search of high-quality sites

Installing HTML into your blog

Ditulis jackcode Pada 22.26.00 Komentar