Images And Infographics Are The Best Media For SEO

When it comes to SEO, “Content is King”! The term “Content” however is a generic term that represents different forms such as text, images, video and audio podcasts. While text content ruled the SEO World for so long, images were hated by the SEO experts as the search engine bots did not index them. On top of that, the images cannot carry “anchor text” backlinks and so they carried only negligible importance in SEO. Images were mostly ignored when planning link building strategies because of these reasons. This was the case before a couple of years. Things changed a lot when the series of Google Panda and Penguin updates revolutionized the SEO sector. Google and all major search engines now demand organic and natural editorial links than a bunch of anchor text links from manipulated directories. In order to get best quality editorial links, the content you publish must be socially engaging. This is where text content fails miserably and the images win hands on.

Here is how images can get the best quality backlinks for your website:

It is a well-known fact that the Social Media crowd loves images compared to text. According to statistics, images get twice many likes in Facebook compared to the text updates. The success of the image sharing social network Pinterest is another great example for people’s lover towards the images. The trend is upon the images and now all you have to do is to identify how you are going to use it for effective link building.

Choice of the Images

Not all the images that you share within the social networks would be spread virally. This is where the Infographics come into play. Infographics can be created for any niche based on statistics, important information, fun facts and famous quotes. All these type of information grab the attention of the social media folks. Images don’t have to be lengthy infographics all the time. As creating an infographic would be a lot time consuming and resource dependent, you can also use simple images with quotes of famous people related to your niche. This work great for promoting brands with a social cause such as health, charity etc. If you are not able to find a perfect saying or quote related to your niche, just make your own and present it as an image and you could become famous along with your brand as well.

The Link Building Strategy

Just sharing the cool infographic that you created on all popular social networks doesn’t do the trick. This would just get exposure to your brand if you have included the company logo in the infographic. Instead, you need to publish them within your website first. Create a new page of just publish it in your official blog. Now share the infographic in top image sites such as Pinterest along with a link back to the original source. According to the content sharing policies, anyone who shares or syndicates your infographic or image should certainly provide a link back to the original source, which in this case would be your website. This strategy helps the links grow naturally and originally, just the way the search engine need them. As said earlier, all these happen natural and with the power of people. Now if you were wondering how to gain natural links as Google demands, social engagement with infographics and images is the answer.

The Magic Of Social Media Engagement

Once the infographic is shared on all the popular image sharing sites, you would witness the power of social engagement. The infographics would be virally shared by others through social media, syndicate it to their blogs and referenced from the top authority sites of your niche. Now remember? The infographic carries your website URL as the original source. So, as the image is spread through multiple channels, your website gets the best quality social signals and organic links that Google and all the major search engines love.

If you are still not convinced that infographics would play a vital role in SEO for 2013, checkout the trends data directly from Google:

Are you beginning to the get the picture now? If you have not included infographics promotion in your SEO and social media marketing campaigns yet, it’s high time to do it now.