If you own or manage a website for a business you should be aware of certain issues that some organizations are looking to identify for potential legal risk. One of those involves the media content that you may use for your website.
This is for websites that are using copyrighted material without approval. Often website owners when creating a website find an image on the internet that they like and just take a copy of it to include on their website to limit website legal risk. Some website developers may post an image and include an attribution to the photo which is often seen below an image thinking that this will suffice.
Unfortunately there are certain companies have acquired rights to large libraries of images and are quite aggressive at claiming violations and suing small businesses that may have posted an image on their website that they may have license rights.
If you are managing your own website or having it done by a third party company, it is important that you use only pictures that you have taken yourself or that you have acquired from a source that is clearly approved for use.
There are several sources on the internet that provide images for use on websites under licensed agreement for a fee. This can be either on a per image basis or can be by subscription where you get use to larger numbers of images. Keep in mind that if a website developer has a subscription for image use this may not cover use of websites that are owned by their clients.
There are sites that have free images available for free use however these are not as large a collection as some of the paid sites maintain. Some of these sites are:
https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
Another source that some people use is to do a specific search on Google Images then use the Advanced Search option under Settings and under Usage Rights select free to use or share commercially. Some people will use this as a source for selecting images to use and it is usually a reliable source. It is not unheard of for some of these images to be mislabeled by the website they are located on and Google validate that license rights. Each of these sites will have some form of statement describing their permission for using images on their site. You should make a copy of this statement and post this on
your Terms of Service page along with a link to the page that this statement is located on. This will help to verify your rights to using content and limit website legal risk.
For more tips on proper website optimization for SEO contact Randy at Osiyo Digital Marketing at https://osiyo.us or call at 918-406-2664.