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?

Over the past couple of weeks, while I’ve been researching Search related stats and Social Media information; I have come across some ultra-cool Infographics that explain the most complicated scenarios through the use of visual mediums – usually these are images and videos.

Hence, the cliche of “a picture speaks a thousand words” is definitely true in this case, especially in the world of Search and Social Media. So I decided to share some of these cool Infographics with you and to show how powerful they can be for SEO.

This was definitely at the top of my list for the best Infographics. The whole idea of simplifying an incredibly complex situation such as the credit crunch was illustrated incredibly well. Not only did this allow people to understand what really happened with the current credit crisis, but the use of pictures, and a well deployed Vimeo video, helped create a viral marketing spin on the whole thing. From an SEO perspective, the hub website, www.crisisofcredit.com, gained more than 18,500 links within 8 months and the Vimeo video gained 2.1 million views. In addition, iIf you also look at the SERPs for “the crisis of credit”, you’ll see that the 6 out of 10 results are all surrounding this original infographic, which is a great example of dominating the search engine results.

The next on my list of favourite infographics, is the image below.

This image metaphorically illustrates the complex world of social media that creates a busy city of communities, such as Youtube, Google, Digg and so forth. The original image was created by eBoy; but this image has been used by many other bloggers to visualise the essence of Social Media.

The third infographic which stood out of the crowd was the “If You Printed The Internet” image, as seen below. This is a simple, yet logical way to demonstrate the immense growth of the Internet. Looking at the blog post through the eyes of SEO, this innovative image is a creative way to gain links naturally. To prove its effectiveness, the image has over 175,000 links since the post was created.

Let’s move on to some more complex diagrams that have been successful from a linking building perspective. The next image on the list of cool infographics is Left vs Right World. It looks quite detailed and discusses the Left & Right parties of Government in regards to their regulations. I guess if we were to put this image into legal jargon, it would be near impossible for the general public to understand.. Beyond it’s intricate detail, this image alone has gained over 30,000 links over a span of 2 months. This just shows the effectiveness of link baiting strategies that use visual aids such as infographics.

The image below takes a more scientific visualisation of how people utilise their day with various activities. The great thing about this Flash image is that you can manipulate the different factors to see how the daily routine changes for different demographics. The New York Times also gained over 500 links for this post.

Well the next image is something that most people can relate to, coffee. Everyone likes their coffee made differently; hence there are so many types to choose from, such as Latte, Cappuccino, Flat White and Macchiato. Well the image below shows how some of these coffee types are made and how to articulate their names. It seemed appropriate to bring this image up, not only for its clever use of imagery, but also to show how a simple concept can generate so much interest. The blog post and infographic gained 408 comments over 2 months and 50,000 links to the whole blog site.

Finally, the last of the infographics that made my short list was the “Billion Dollar Gram”. The image is blatantly obvious; it’s trying to show how the economy spends, earns, gives and tightens its liquidity. I personally would say this is not the prettiest of infographics, but definitely gets the point across through one picture.

In conclusion, the above set of infographic examples are only some of many that I happened to come across. It appears more and more common for bloggers and social networks to use images and videos to explain either a simple or complex concept. Not only do these images seem a lot more pleasant to the eye, they also have a lot of traction to gain links and user generated feedback. This natural link building exercise plays an important role in SEO to help build relevant links back to the hub website and improve the visibility of the brand. This is something to then consider for a lot of brands.

Last week, I had come across this article in Search Engine Land about “Using Infographics in Social Media to Promote Content and Visualize Data” and it looked like a great topic to be discussing. Especially the word “Infographics” – does this method of communication have the potential to effectively illustrate a complex topic or opinion in the social media spectrum? Given that there is so much out there on Twitter, Digg, StumbleUpon and other social media platforms, how can we start differentiating the cool stuff from the over-inflated text content?

Well before we discuss social media, let’s look at what is info-graphics? As suggested by Wikipedia, it is defined as:

“..visual representations of information, data or knowledge. These graphics are used where complex information needs to be explained quickly and clearly, such as in signs, maps, journalism, technical writing, and education.”

Source: Wikipedia – Information Graphics

This visual communication tool has been used for ages by scientists, mathematicians and statisticians to help convey conceptual information and as it is an image-based, it contains very little text. And as the saying goes, pictures speak a thousand words; so images used to visualise information can be an effective way to “make a point” with a bang! Especially if we are trying to demonstrate a complex concept, then using pictures should help users understand the message with ease.

Let’s look at some examples of what this looks like, especially in the social space.
Flickr would be good example of illustrating their Flickr User Model:

Secondly, an example about the level of user participation in the social media world by Forrester Research:

But info-graphics is not only images and can be taken a step further by animating them into video format. For instances, look at how the current Credit Crisis can be visualized:

See, even dry and complex information can be simplified with a few animated images. I found the video content quite interesting and self-explanatory but if it was put all in words then I’d probably stop reading it.

So this now brings us to seeing how info-graphics can be used in social media.

Well, we all know that social media users have a short attention span and will move on to the next piece of content if they don’t find your content interesting enough in the first few seconds. Hence using info-graphics can play an increasingly important role to hook the user in with the first glance. So it would be safe to say that using info-graphics will have a greater chance to become more viral and allow people to share your visual content with their networks, like the example above with the Credit Crisis video.

It might be worthwhile trying this out with your next blog post or social media post and see how many more “diggs” or “tweets” you get.

Anyway, to end, check out a few more examples of pretty good info-graphics content on Smashing Magazines and it might also be worthwhile reading up the article in Search Engine Land.