25 Most Popular Instagram Hashtags for Getting NEW Followers

Are you on Instagram?

If not, you're probably the only one left. :)

Instagram is ON FIRE! And businesses are now using it to boost traffic & sales.

And many are using Post Planner to find the HOTTEST Instagram photos for ANY hashtag!

CLICK HERE to Find the Hottest Instagram Photos for ANY Hashtag

Personally, I use popular Instagram hashtags whenever possible to get more followers, comments & "Double Taps" (Likes).

I used to NEVER use hashtags on Instagram. I just didn't think they worked.

Boy was I wrong!! Once I started using hashtags on my posts, my Instagram follower count jumped from 400 to almost 2,900!

So in this post, I've listed 25 of the most popular Instagram hashtags so you can use them to increase your follower count.

And if you want even more awesome Instagram hashtags, click here:

>> Best Instagram Hashtags for Business <<

25 Most Popular Instagram Hashtags for Getting NEW Followers

Most people just wing it when deciding on hashtags, using spur-of-the-moment ideas like #manthisisagreathashtag. :)

But nobody is following that hashtag so you can't expect much action from it.

It's better to use hashtags that are practically always trending on Instagram. That way users who follow the hashtags may Like & interact with your posts when they see them in the feed.

I used a tool called Websta to unearth the most popular hashtags on Instagram -- and I listed those hashtags in this article.

1. #love

>> Click to Tweet

More than 696 million Instagram posts have the #love hashtag!

Here's a cool photo from Instagram user @trevbaust that had the #love hashtag.

2. #instagood

>> Click to Tweet

This hashtag has appeared on about 314 million posts.

@gnp75 used #instagood in a comment on this catchy pic.

3. #me

>> Click to Tweet

More than 297 million posts have the #me hashtag.

@askaaronlee used #me to show off his new headshot!

4. #tbt

>> Click to Tweet

This is a popular hashtag for those learning how to market on Instagram.

Also known as "Throwback Thursday", the hashtag encourages people to post images from the past. It's appeared on more than 272 million posts.

Our buddy Mike Gingerich posted this #tbt pic from his junior high track days! I wonder if he won?

5. #cute

>> Click to Tweet

This hashtag has appeared on more than 258 million posts!

The @babies Instagram account is one of my favorites!

6. #follow

>> Click to Tweet

The #follow hashtag has appeared on more than 258 million posts. Most of these people were likely seeking new followers.

@katierobinsonartwork used the #follow hashtag to show her art on Instagram!

7. #followme

>> Click to Tweet

Another attempt to get more Likes and followers on Instagram, this hashtag has been used about 238 million times.

@razzedbaby uses the #followme hashtag all the time.

8. #photooftheday

>> Click to Tweet

Reserved for your best shots... 237 million posts & counting!

@stefkardos displayed sketches with the #photooftheday hashtag.

9. #happy

>> Click to Tweet

The #happy hashtag has appeared on some 220 million posts.

Here's a funny photo from @melanyzuco that used the #happy hashtag!

10. #tagforlikes

>> Click to Tweet

This popular hashtag asks people to tag them in posts so they can get more Likes.

Does it work? Regardless, the hashtag has appeared on 220 million posts.

Nice use of the #tagforlikes hashtag by @cszart.

11. #beautiful

>> Click to Tweet

Instagram users have typed this hashtag more than 212 million times.

My buddy @cjhudgins used the #beautiful hashtag on this image.

12. #girl

>> Click to Tweet

The #girl hashtag has been used more than 202 million times!

#Girl would've worked great on this photo.

13. #like

>> Click to Tweet

This hashtag has been used more than 193 million times.

14. #selfie

>> Click to Tweet

One of my favorite Instagram posts is the selfie -- and selfies work great for social media marketing! This hashtag has been used 185 million times!

@the_doolio is a character on the new television program "Selfie"!

15. #picoftheday

>> Click to Tweet

Similar to #8 (#photooftheday), Instagram users have used this hashtag more than 174 million times.

This #picoftheday from @itsyourlife2908 made my chuckle.

16. #summer

>> Click to Tweet

Surprisingly, this seasonal hashtag has been used 168 million times.

@sopadreisland posts lots of cool #summer pics.

17. #fun

>> Click to Tweet

#Fun made the top 20 with 163 million posts.

@mo_danielle used the #fun hashtag on this image.

18. #smile

>> Click to Tweet

This cheery hashtag has been used about 161 million times.

Here's a great #smile pic from @nancymcpeake.

19. #friends

>> Click to Tweet

Friends are a big part of many people's Instagram experience. The hashtag has been used 160 million times.

@dubsteppickles got lots of response after using the #friends hashtag in the comments.

20. #like4like

>> Click to Tweet

People use this hashtag to get others to Like their posts in exchange for Likes.

It's also an easy way to get more Instagram followers. The hashtag's been used 159 million times.

Here's a cool #like4like photo from @marzicortese.

21. #instadaily

>> Click to Tweet

The #instadaily hashtag has been used 154 million times.

There are lots of #instadaily pics on the @tornadotitans Instagram account.

22. #fashion

>> Click to Tweet

Since Instagram is huge for fashion, I'm not surprised that this hashtag has been used 146 million times.

The #fashion hashtag on a photo from @fashion!

23. #igers

>> Click to Tweet

This hashtag -- short for "Instagram Users" -- has been used 144 million times.

You'll have no problem finding photos with #igers.

24. #instalike

>> Click to Tweet

I've had success using this hashtag. And it's appeared on Instagram 135 million times.

The #instalike hashtag really works!

25. #food

>> Click to Tweet

And this last one was no surprise at all! The #food hashtag has been used 133 million times.

Here's my son holding a giant zucchini!

Use Instagram Hashtags Wisely

Definitely consider hashtags when deciding what to post on Instagram -- but don't overdo it.

>> Click to Tweet <<

Too many hashtags make your posts look clumsy!

Try putting a few in the post & adding more in the comments.

You'll notice that lots of users add the top 25 hashtags as their complete description -- that doesn't look natural & likely won't lead to long-term followers or engagement.

Remember: BE HUMAN!

Experiment to find out what works best with your followers. And use Websta to find other popular hashtags. The tool lets you search by hashtag & username to find those with similar interests as you.

What about you? What hashtags do you follow on Instagram?

source: http://www.postplanner.com/popular-instagram-hashtags-for-getting-new-followers/___________________

17 Amazing Sites With Breathtaking Free Stock Photos

Photography has always been an integral part of web design. Unfortunately, we’ve grown accustomed to seeing crappy stock images of people in suits shaking hands. Not only are a lot of these stock photos tacky, but some of them cost money!

Thankfully, there’s been a growing number of websites with beautiful stock photography popping up all over the web. Best of all, they’re free.

In this post, we’ve curated a list of awesome websites for free stock photos.

Bonus: If you’re looking to create highly engaging images for your blog posts, social media, or ad campaigns, check out Snappa – the perfect graphic design tool for digital marketers.

Quick Note About Licenses

Many of these photographs are free from copyright restrictions or licensed under creative commons public domain dedication. This means you can copy, modify, distribute and perform the work, even for commercial purposes, all without asking permission.

However, some photos may require attribution. We’ve done our best to identify which license they fall under but we still advise you to do your own research and determine how these images can be used.

With that out of the way, let’s dive into our top picks for free stock photos.

StockSnap.io

StockSnap.io has a large selection of beautiful free stock photos and high resolution images. The site also has a very handy search feature making it easy to browse through the thousands of images available. In addition, the site tracks views and downloads so you can find the most popular photos available.

StockSnap adds hundreds of images on a weekly basis and all photos are released under creative commons public domain – no attribution required.

Unsplash

Unsplash is a collection of free high-resolution photos and has arguably become the best source for stock images. In fact, we’ve noticed some of our theme authors using these images in theirBootstrap themes & templates.

Unsplash releases 10 new photos every 10 days and they’re released under the creative commons public domain license.

Gratisography

Gratisography offers free high-resolution pictures you can use on your personal and commercial projects. New awesome pictures are added weekly and are free of copyright restrictions. All pictures are captured by Ryan McGuire of Bells Design.

Negative Space

Negative Space provides 20 new photos every week released under Creative Commons CC0. The photos are searchable and can be sorted by category, copy space and color.

 

Splitshire

Splitshire is a collection of delicious free stock photos by web deisgner Daniel Nanescu. The photos are free for personal and commercial use.

Little Visuals

This mention comes with a bit of sad news. The owner of the site Nic passed away and thus no longer provides new pictures. All photos that have been posted were released under the creative commons license public domain dedication.

Life of Pix

Life of Pix is a resource created by the LEEROY creative agency offering free high-resolution photos with no copyright restrictions. New pictures are added weekly.

Death to Stock Photos

Every month a photo pack of 10 photos within a certain category will be delivered to your inbox. The goal of Death to Stock Photos is to bring you a variety of options in which to use for your mockups, blog posts or social media.

Death to stock photo uses their own license which you can read on their webpage.

Superfamous Studios

Superfamous is the Los Angeles-based studio of Dutch interaction designer Folkert Gorter. You can use the work for your own purposes — including commercial use — as long as credit is provided. Folkert features various collections including aerial, biological, geological, and more.

Picjumbo

Picjumbo is a collection of totally free photos for your commercial & personal works. New photos are added daily from a wide variety of categories including abstract, fashion, nature, technology and much more.

IM Free

A curated collection of free resources, all for commercial use. Since the photos are curated from various sources, some photos may require attribution.

Photo by Kevin N. Murphy

New Old Stock

Vintage photos from the public archives free of known copyright restrictions.

Getrefe

Free mobile photos for your personal or commercial projects.

Lock & Stock Photos

Lock & Stock Photos are the works of AJ Montpetit. He’s giving back to the open source community by sharing his photographs under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareALike.

Snapwire Snaps

Get 7 free photos every 7 days. Photos are public domain and free from copyright restrictions.

Jay Mantri

7 new photos released every Thursday under the Creative Commons CC0 license. Jay Mantri posts some really nice photos with a variety of different themes.

Tookapic Stock

Tookapic stock is a marketplace for both free & premium stock photos. You can filter by free photos which are all released under Creative Commons CC0. 

Conclusion

As you can see, there’s a growing number of fantastic resources for stock photography. These websites have become a blessing for web designers, bloggers and creative people. We strongly encourage you to browse through each of these websites and incorporate them into your own designs.

Source https://bootstrapbay.com/blog/free-stock-photos/

how to add a picture to your blog header

This looks like a really nifty, easy way to get your photo on your header...

Optimizing images for SEO

f you are for instance a blogger or write articles for an online magazine or newspaper, you encounter this question on a probably daily basis: should I add an image to my article? The answer is “Yes”. Images make an article more vivid and can actually contribute to improving the SEO for your article. In this post, I’d like to explain the steps that should be taken to fully optimize an image for SEO.

Use images

Images, when added with a certain consideration, will help understand your article a lot. “A picture is worth a thousand words”. Yeah, well, probably not for Google, but it can for sure spice up a 1000 dull words, illustrate what you mean in a chart or data flow diagram, or simply make your social media efforts more attractive.

It’s a simple recommendation: use images to every article you write online. It’ll make it more appealing.

Finding the right image

If you have the opportunity to add your own image, please do so. Your team page needs pictures of your team, not this dude on the right or one of his stock photo friends. Off topic: let alone that the dude might need a haircut.

Your article needs an image that has the same subject as your article. If you would use an image, just to use an image and get a green bullet in our SEO plugin, you are doing it wrong. The image should reflect the topic of the post, or have illustrative purposes within the article, of course.

There is a simple image SEO reason for that: an image that is surrounded by related text, ranks better for the keyword it is optimized for. More details on image SEO later.

You might have seen the images we are using for our posts (the ones with the titles). We have added these for a number of reasons:

• They emphasize the title or subject of the post
• It’ll trigger a visitor to read the post, as the first view isn’t just text
• These images are used in OpenGraph tags and Twitter Cards, which will add the image to our social shares.

Just another way to go about adding images. By the way, most of these ‘featured images’ are stock photos. We have made them our own by adding the title in the same way over and over, making the actual image subservient to the text in the image. That goes against a much heard recommendation to not add text in images, but as mentioned, we use that specific image for other purposes, not per se for SEO.

If there is no way to use images of your own, there are other ways to find more unique images and refrain from using stock photos. Flickr.com is a nice image source for instance, as explained in this article: How to Use Creative Commons Images from Flickr. I also like the images provided by sites like freeimages.com (formerly known as sxc.hu). Check here for more image resources. You should stay away from the obvious stock photos, and rather pick the ones that look (ok, just a bit) more genuine. It almost seems like images with people always look like stock photos, unless taken by yourself. In the end, that is still the best idea.

Obvious alternatives for photos could be illustrations, like we sometimes use, or graphs, of course. An honorable mention should go to animated GIFs, as these seem to become more and more popular these days.

Animated GIFs are very popular these days

Don’t go overboard. It’ll make your post less attractive to read, as your reading will be interrupted by the movement in the image, of course. Like in the post where I found the above image.

Preparing images for use in your article

When you have found the right image to use, either an illustration, chart or photo, the next step is to optimize that image for use on your website. There are a number of things to take in consideration:

Choose the right file name

Image SEO starts with the right file name. Of course this is the first location to use that keyword. Without even looking at the actual image, you want Google to know what the image is about. It’s simple: if your image is a sunrise in Paris showing the Notre Dame, the file name shouldn’t be DSC4536.jpg, but notre-dame-paris-sunrise.jpg. The main keyword would be Notre Dame, as that is the main subject of the photo, that is why I added that at the beginning of the file name.

Scale for image SEO

Loading times are an important UX and therefore SEO aspect. The faster the site, the easier to visit and index a page is. Images can have a huge impact on loading times, especially when you load a huge image and show it really small, like using a 2500×1500 pixels image and showing it at 250×150 pixels size. The entire image will still have to be loaded. Scale the image to the size you want to show it. WordPress helps by providing the image in multiple sizes after upload already. Unfortunately that doesn’t mean the file size is optimized as well, that’s just the image size.

Reduce file size

The next step in image SEO should be to make sure that scaled image is served in the smallest file size possible. There are tools for that. Of course you could just export the image an test what percentage of quality is acceptable, but I prefer (especially with retina and similar screens) to use 100% quality images.

Optimize image file size for instance using JPEGMini

You can still reduce the file size of these images by for instance removing the EXIF data. We recommend using tools like ImageOptim or websites like JPEGMini or PunyPNG. I’ve also heard great stories about Kraken.io, but I haven’t used that myself, to be honest.

After you have uploaded the image, tools like YSlow can tell you if your image optimization succeeded.

Adding the image to your article

Don’t just stuff it in somewhere. I already mentioned adding it near / at / in related textual content. That simply helps a lot. It makes sure the content is relevant for the image as well, as it is the other way around.

Captions

The caption of the image is the text that accompanies the image. At most images in this article, it’s the text in the gray box below it. Why is that text important for image SEO as well? People use that text in scanning an article. Next to headings, people tend to scan the image and include the caption as well in that scan. Nielsen actually wrote back in 1997: “Elements that enhance scanning include headings, large type, bold text, highlighted text, bulleted lists, graphics, captions, topic sentences, and tables of contents.” In 2012, KissMetric even stated that “Captions under images are read on average 300% more than the body copy itself, so not using them, or not using them correctly, means missing out on an opportunity to engage a huge number of potential readers.”

Do we add captions to all images? No. As mentioned, sometimes images just serve another purpose. Decide whether the image at hand is an image you want to use for SEO as well or not. Keeping over-optimization in mind, I’d say you should add a caption if it would make sense to the visitor if that caption is added. Think about the visitor first, don’t add a caption just for image SEO.

Alt text and title text

The alt text is added to an image so there will be a descriptive text when the image for whatever reason can’t be displayed to the visitor. I can’t put it any better than Wikipedia: “In situations where the image is not available to the reader, perhaps because they have turned off images in their web browser or are using a screen reader due to a visual impairment, the alternative text ensures that no information or functionality is lost.” Be sure to add alt texts. Make sure the alt text includes your SEO keyword and relates to / describes the image. DigitalSherpa did a nice article on How to Write SEO-Friendly Alt-Text For Your Images.

When hovering an image, IE shows the alt text as a ‘tooltip’. Chrome show the title text,like it was intended. Title text for images is similar and a lot of people that use these simply copy the alt text. More and more people simply leave these out. What is it for? “The title attribute can be very useful, but it is not a safe way of providing crucial information. Instead it offers a good way to provide non-essential information, for example the mood of the image, or what it means in context.” it’s nice to have information indeed, and isn’t taken in account for image SEO.

OpenGraph

I mentioned using the image for social sharing. If you add the right image tag to your <head>section like this:

<meta property="og:image" content="http://example.com/link-to-image.jpg" />

That will make sure the image is included in your share on Facebook (and OpenGraph is also used for Pinterest, for instance). Our WordPress SEO plugin has a Social section where you can set this image. Make sure to use a high quality image, like the original image you use in the post, as higher quality / larger images tend to be used by the social platforms more often. If you have set this up correctly, and it doesn’t work, try to flush Facebook’s cache in the URL Debugger.

Twitter Cards do the same for Twitter, and are also generated by our plugin.

Alignment

Let me be honest, this is a pet peeve of mine. Images shouldn’t break the left reading line. I’m sure there are studies about this but I’m taking full responsibility for this myself: I just really don’t like it when text starts on the right of an image, only to jump below the image later:

Maintain the left reading line; don’t align images to the left

If an image is used that is the same width as your textual column, that would be no problem. It will even help emphasizing the image more.

Note that this has absolutely nothing to do with image SEO, but I saw an opportunity to express my opinion and used it :) I think it’s bad for user experience. Just to please me: don’t. Thanks a lot for that.

XML image sitemaps

If you are a web developer, you might wonder about XML image sitemaps. I’d rather say: images in XML sitemaps. Google is pretty clear about this:

To give Google information about images on your site, you’ll need to add image-specific tags to a sitemap. You can use a separate sitemap to list images, or you can add image information to an existing sitemap. Use the method works for you!

Every now and then, people ask us about XML image sitemaps. We don’t generate these in our plugin, but as Google states, instead these images are included in the page or post sitemaps. Just scroll down in our post sitemap and find that we have added images to all our latest posts (there is a column telling you that). Adding images to your XML sitemaps help Google index your images, so be sure to do so for better image SEO.

TL;DR

Image SEO is the sum of a number of elements. With Google being able to recognize elements in the image better every day, it makes sense to make sure the image and all elements contribute to user experience as well as SEO. It would be foolish to try to fool Google.

Take these things in mind when adding an image to an article:

• Use a relevant image that matches your text
• Pick the right file name for your image
• Make sure image dimension match the image size as displayed
• Reduce file size for faster loading
• Add a caption for easier scanning of the page
• Use an image alt text, title text is optional
• Add OpenGraph and Twitter Card tags for the image
• Don’t break the left reading line using an image
• Use images in your XML sitemaps

Next to image SEO and using images for user experience, images can also play an important role in conversion. If you like to know more about that, be sure to read Thijs’ post: Visually direct and captivate your visitors

Source https://yoast.com/image-seo/