Infographics, or Information graphics, are a visual representation of complex data or knowledge that is presented in an easy to understand graphic. While infographics have been around for a long time, Internet marketers have turned to using infographics as a link building tactic. As you can see from the Google Trends graph, infographics started to really pick up at the beginning of 2010.
So the start of 2010 has been the year of the infographic linkbait. Producing an attention grabbing and timely infographic can generate a large number of backlinks to your own site. If the infographic is interesting enough people will naturally start to link back to it, thus building off-site backlinks to your site. The key to producing one of these viral infographics is to ensure there is value in the data being presented, the visual imagery is bold and colorful, and the infographic is easily sharable.
Here are a couple more tips:
- Host infographic on your own web site or blog. You want people to link back to the source.
- Add a share button on the page (like AddThis or ShareThis) to promote social syndication.
- Add an "Embed This Image". See YouTube as an example of how they allow you to share videos and embeded them on third-party sites.
- Remember relevance and timeliness
Here are a couple of examples of infographics.