Good topical comment. Although I don’t agree.

I was writing about using products for link building. The product I am talking about is a phone holder, and the link goes specifically to the product that the video relates to – making it entirely relevant. It would have been unnatural if I’d linked to some landing page or something.

Hi Jo. Yep, there is always the inevitable expectation that some people will steal your images and re-use them, which is completely against copyright law. Although these days, with things such as Google Image search (http://www.google.com/insidesearch/features/images/searchbyimage.html), it is getting easier to track down such abusers.

Here is a brilliant post by James Carson on how he used this situation as an opportunity for some widespread link-building: http://www.jamescarson.co.uk/socialsearch/2011/08/22/a-winning-12-stage-hustle-process-for-link-building/

I think, so long as you can find a webmaster or website owner who will actually respond to you, simply the threat of legal action can be a sufficient ‘stick’, particularly if all they have to do is put a link up to your page.

Re your reply to Amy, you’re right it is important to get your ownerships in writing when it comes to all graphics on your site. But, even then, there can be problems with people just stealing images and blatantly reusing them without permission. At the end of the day, it depends on how willing you are to enter into expensive legal wrangling… and a lot of these content thieves rely on your inertia and lack of funds to pursue them.

Hi Jo, thanks for the comment (I found and de-spammed it). I think the Facebook comment is an interesting one – you see all sorts of businesses that have jumped on the social media bangwagon and tried to engage users through platforms such as Facebook, when perhaps their efforts could be better directed elsewhere. I think it is incredibly important for small business owners to make sensible choices about which social media platforms they are going to try and target. I personally see Facebook as an almost exclusively B2C platform, and even ‘boring’ B2C businesses such as plumbers are not suitable for Facebook, in my opinion.

Your other point is also very important, and probably something I did not highlight sufficiently in my post – whatever creative content you produce for your site, even if the intention is to garner links for SEO, it will have a secondary impact of making you stand out from the crowd. These days it is very easy to find a whole host of websites that offer the same or similar content, and if you can be the one doing something different then you could increase your conversion rate by simply appearing different.

Hi Amy, good question – you need to be very careful that you own the copyright for the work yourself before you start licensing it through Creative Commons (although you should not really be using images on your site anyway if you are not the copyright owner or have an agreement in place with the owner).

This situation would entirely depend upon how the relationship between the website owner and the photographer is defined. If you contract a photographer to take photos for you to use on your website, then you would own the material. If the photographer is a third party and not contracted/employed by you, then you would need to get permission from them to use the images on your website, and to release under a Creative Commons license.

I would be up-front with the photographer and say you want to encourage your website users to make use of the images and give attribution back to your company/website in order to increase exposure to your service or product. If you are having conversations like this, I would definitely recommend getting your agreement in writing so you avoid any issues further down the line regarding Copyright law.

I would suggest reading through the licensing information on https://creativecommons.org to ensure you fully understand how the licenses work, and they also have a handy tool which can provide you with the html you would need to license your work properly, and suggests other online communities you can share your work with (in addition to publishing on your own website).