What is an Infographic? An infographic is a pictorial representation of specific data or knowledge. Infographics can be a great way to showcase information on a particular subject area and can prove to be a good source of link value. Infographics have the ability to transform plain material into interesting and exciting web content. Over the past few years the value of infographics has grown tremendously because many have begun to recognize the potential they have to connect with their target audience.
from http://www.seomoz.org/blog/4-essential-seo-infographics, September 2011
Link value or link juice is a term often used in Search Engine Optimization and refers to the amount of value that the search engines like Google attribute to a website or link. Link juice is assigned to web pages and is dispersed throughout a website based on how well your website is optimized. The more links and most importantly the more high quality links a website has directly translates into the more link juice a website is likely to have.
When talking about Links it is important to understand some important fundamentals. Total links quantity indicates the total number of links that your website or webpage possesses. The merit of these links can vary which brings us to the linking source. The linking source describes who is linking to your content and how credible or trustworthy they are. The sites that have a higher rank will pass on more value than those with a lower web rank. Even though the websites with a higher rank may provide more value it is also important to have diversity among your links. It’s ok to have links from lower ranked pages as long as there is a balance between link values.
Another major factor with links is anchor text. The anchor text is the keywords and descriptions other websites use when linking to your content. Accurate anchor text is essential for good SEO. You want something that describes your content well and not something like “Click here”. The visible text for a link or the anchor text should include the source and a short description of the linked content, for example when linking to the Internet Beacon’s blog it should look something like Internet Beacon’s SEO Blog.
Methods of obtaining link value include submitting your articles to article directories, submitting your website to high quality directories, participating in forums or online communities, commenting on blogs, participating in social media, linking to your other online profiles, submitting to RSS feeds, and successfully linking your internal webpages. One of the easiest and more effortless methods of acquiring link juice is creating valuable and link worthy content on your website. Link worthy content is commonly called linkbait because of its ability to attract links from other websites. Although creating amazing content or Linkbait may take some effort it is the content that typically does the heavy lifting in gathering link juice. This is why infographics have become a major tool when it comes to attracting an audience and obtaining links.
Linkbait isn’t only infographics but can also be content or resources like tutorials, tools, how to guides, top 100 lists, or basically any resource that serves a specific niche. This type of content, when discovered is often linked to and can appoint you or your site as an industry authority. Content like infographics is easy to understand and neatly groups information in easy to digest bites. A successful infographic will entice others to link to it whether they link it to their website or in a blog article, either way the websites that are linked to your content are providing more links and with that, more value.
Infographics have a reputation of being able to quickly spread across the internet which is why they are great for SEO. Infographics may spread fast and be an easy method of gathering link value but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t things you can do to improve their SEO benefits. Below are some ways to integrate SEO into your infographics and build successful links.
- Use targeted Keywords in your infographic’s title.
- Make the infographic relevant and industry specific.
- Submit it to web and article directories.
- Submit it to social media sites.
- Add social media and share icons to the page so visitors can quickly share their findings.
- Link to the infographic from your other internal pages.
- Use word of mouth to other industry professionals.
Hopefully, being creative with your content and using these search engine optimization methods for infographics can help you to see an increase in your link value!
Visit 8 Awesome SEO Infographics and 4 Essential SEO Infographics from SEO Moz to see some examples of infographics.
Thanks for reading
Dustin
Tags: anchor text, backlinks, content, infographics, link juice, link value, linkbait, Links, seo, seo infographics
