Flickr has become increasingly popular as a very powerful tool for bloggers looking to brighten up their content. An attractive post, containing interesting images, often has a far greater likelihood of gaining attention from social media audiences, attracting natural links and more importantly actually being read in the first place! In this post, I’ve decided to look at some ideas and tools which I find useful when looking for inspiration in a new blog post.

Image credit: Polvero

Find top rated Creative Commons images on Flickr
Lisa Barone recently talked about how you can make good use of Creative Commons (CC) licensed images on Flickr. However, if I don’t have a particular idea in mind; rather than performing a keyword CC image search, one tip I find very useful is to perform an empty query. A blank query from Flickr’s normal search won’t work, but an empty CC image advanced search will show all images which are available under the CC license.

If you then order these by “Most Interesting”, you are left with a list of the top rated CC images available on Flickr. You should then be able to find a few good ones reasonably quickly, which will hopefully fit around or inspire a new blog post idea.

This is actually how I found the image to use on this post (above), its number of “faves” and comments meant that it ranked on the first page of results.

3 tools to help you search for useful images:
To help you pick out the best images for your posts, I would also recommend using the following tools.

Flickr Related Tag Browser

In addition to searching Flickr for your chosen keywords, Flickr Related Tag Browser will also search for related keywords too. Potentially finding relevant images you could have quite easily missed if they don’t contain the exact term you searched for.

Compfight

Compfight makes searching Flickr very easy by making the Creative Commons and advanced search options available straight away. Plus the small images displayed in results means that it’s easier to quickly scan through a large number of images quickly.

Roooby

Recently featured on Search Engine Land, Roooby doesn’t actually search Flickr – but it does search for social media images you probably wouldn’t have even thought of, or knew how to search for, on sites like Twitpic and YFrog.

Those are my quick tips for finding great images for your blog posts, so what tactics do you find are most effective?

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Kevin Gibbons is Founder/Director of Strategy at SEOptimise. Kevin is well known within the search industry as a blogger for sites such as Search Engine Land, Econsultancy and Search Engine Watch. Kevin is also a frequent SEO speaker at a number of conferences including Search Marketing Expo (SMX), Search Engine Strategies (SES), a4uexpo, SAScon and BrightonSEO.