Infographics: You’re Doing It Right + (Free Data Sheet)

We’ve been keeping tabs on infographics ever since the linkbuilding tactic came about in 2008, blogged on it a few times and its something we encourage clients to do.

So, after reading David Scoville’s post on SEO.com I decided it was time to share my research on infographics. Over the last few months I’ve compiled over 60 infographics, categorised them by topic, recorded the amount of external links they’ve earned and noted how many times it got retweeted. Is it a fad? I think not. Does it work? It can be an exceptionally good linkbuilding tactic … as you will see in the data we’ve put together.

Check out the free data sheet shared on Google Docs which might help you figure out if this is worth doing in your niche:

And here’s some top tips for publishing an infographic

• Create some textual commentary around the infographic to give it some context.
• Keep the publication of infographic hosted on one place for maximum seo benefit because you want people to link to your site. So, never use Tinypic, Imgur or Flickr to host the JPG because people will link to it there instead of your website.
• Host the infographic on a webpage or within a blog post. Give the infographic some context on the blog post and link to the full size image. Here’s a good example from Focus FYI: blog post to do give the context and the full size image for display purposes.
• Give people share + bookmark functions to easily Retweet, Buzz and stumble it.
• Encourage people to embed it on their blogs by having the code on the page so that it can earn as many links as possible.
• If you have a really long vertical infographic (like this one) then you can try to fit the blog post width format.
• Display the sources on the infographic to show where the data came from.
• Encourage engagement on your blog by prompting people for their comments.

 

What is the best infographic you’ve ever seen? Do you think this medium is a fad?

Tags: infographics, linkbuilding, SEO, social media, twitter