You can use CC-licensed materials as long as you follow the license conditions. One condition of all CC licenses is attribution.
Here is an example of an ideal attribution of a CC-licensed image:
The above image is owned by Credit Score Geek
Add image attribution to the link required by the author/owner/website. It does not matter how you want to display the link, as long as it’s directly under the image that you are using or at the very bottom of your article. Even though this is a tutorial on how to give attribution, notice how I did it correctly above. This is required. Here are a couple of examples:
It does not matter how you link to the attribution page, as long as you were linking to the page requested by the author. Either one of the two examples above would be fine.
If the author does not give specific instructions on how to give attribution, you should link to either their author page or the page that the image is located on. Here are two examples below:
- Author: Mike Cohen
- Source: Exercise by Mike Cohen
How you attribute authors of the CC works will depend on whether you modify the content, if you create a derivative, if there are multiple sources, etc.