Good website images can improve appearance, while reused or overused photos may hurt professionalism and search rankings. The post ranks image sources from best to worst, favoring original photos, then free photo sites, paid stock images, and finally Google Images.
It recommends taking your own photos when possible, using free libraries like Unsplash and Pexels, or buying stock images after comparing options and prices. It warns that Google Images usually contains reused content that is not safe to republish.
Adding good images to your website, blog, or ecommerce site, can make the difference between a good looking website and a great looking website. Most of the templates in our Easy Site Builder can work with any type of business by simply changing the images. The issue is, using recycled over-used images can hurt your Google rank and look unprofessional. Taking your own images can be cumbersome and difficult. Buying images can be really expensive, especially for big websites.
Here are good ways to get images for your website listed in order of best to worst.
- Take your own pictures
Getting a nice camera like a DSLR Canon with a nifty fifty lens will do wonders. It’s hard to take a bad photo if you have it in focus and good lighting. Your IPhone and high end Android camera can do just fine as well. Make sure to take lots of images on each trip (photo shoot) so you don’t have to several take trips each time you need a picture in the future.
- Get photos from a free photo website
There is a two popular free photo websites:
https://unsplash.com & https://www.pexels.com/ .These sites are updated often and have great quality free photos you can use for personal and commercial use. The draw back is there is not a lot of images to choose from.
- Buy website stock photo images
There is many paid stock photo services, and we can’t say which is better because we don’t know. I have used them all now and again and some are more expensive than others, and some have better images than others. Finding the right images is normally the most important part, and I have found the best image many times is in the trenches of really cheesy stock photos. I like to check several websites for the images I like. I compare prices, check for any specials, and grab the one I like best that’s not too much money. Sometimes though, I will splurge if the image is perfect ($5 an image). Be careful though, most stock photos look cheesy and can be over-used. People and Google love original content. That is why doing your own images is the best option on this list.
- Google images
You can find some good images on the Google image search, but most images are not allowed to be re-used and the ones that can, will probably be over-used. You also know that Google has spidered and cached the image, so using it will hurt your SEO rank for sure. Duplicate content always dings your SEO.