Infographics are graphic visual representations of information or knowledge. They are hybrids of images and text. People find them fun and interactive while being eye catching and a great way of easily communicating large amounts of data. How can you use infographics to your advantage? An infographic is an image but search engines cannot read them. However, the link bait potential that infographics have, prop-up natural link building. Search engines will not know what your infographic is about, but the audience will. Internet users love creative designs. Publishing long articles may not catch their attention so infographics are an effective way of communicating information in an attractive way.
Make your infographic sharable. Embed a link back to your site within the infographic so you will receive inbound links every time people share, embed and pin it. Place social sharing buttons near infographics that allow visitors to tweet or share a link back to your website. Bloggers frequently link to content that is interesting and they will link to your site if the infographic you’ve published is visually appealing and will educate viewers on a particular subject or area of interest. Social sharing communities result in lots of inbound links back to your website as more and more people share it. Promote the infographic using social media bookmarking and networking sites such as Twitter. Submit your infographic to graphic submission directories like Flicker, with a creative common license that requires anyone who uses your image to include a link to your website. Blog owners using infographics often garner lots of comments and page views. Name the infographic file with hyphen-separated keywords for your website so that keywords appear in links. Your infographic will influence the types of domains who share links to it, so the information presented by the infographic should be related to your website.
Simply putting an infographic on your site will not help generate links. People will only share your infographic if it is interesting, but it’s worth the extra effort to present your data in a fresh and imaginative way to capture viewer’s attention. An infographic SEO campaign can become a viral link building process. Infographics are affordable, hence a cost effective solution for local and small business SEO. Website visitors want to be both entertained and informed. A comprehensive, data driven and interesting infographic acts as visual shorthand. Infographics can help to improve a website’s popularity and promote brand awareness as well.
