Online, visual information is powerful. Images, they’re very powerful. Videos are even more powerful. But infographics may be the most powerful images of all.
Infographics rely on two things – both powerful in themselves.
- Information
- Graphics
An infographic is simply a set of facts – or information – packaged visually. The information is cast as an image, or graphic, so that it is easy to consume, doesn’t take a lot of time to analyze, and provides a visual look at a load of information that might be more difficult and detailed to analyze in simple text form.
The downside to infographics is that they are difficult to SEO. Because they are an image rather than text, you have to treat them like an image for the search engines. The upside, however, is that a powerful infographic can attract a huge amount of links, which is outstanding SEO. You can actually use an infographic as link bait and improve the overall SEO of your website.
You should also include an alt tag for your infographic to give it that image SEO quality you desire.
Once your visitor shows up to your site to see the work you’ve put into the powerful visual presentation of your information, you should get them to share it with their friends by providing social sharing buttons. That can be additional SEO and a huge source of traffic.
If you plan to do any Internet marketing at all, then the most important thing to keep in mind about your business is that you are first and foremost a publisher. A self-publisher, but a publisher nonetheless.
Why is it so important to consider yourself a self-publisher? Because when you think about it, publishers own and control the flow of information and information is the key to your business.
It doesn’t matter if you run a brick and mortar busines or an online-only business, if you are marketing online, then you are publishing information. Articles, blogs, Twitter feeds, Facebook status updates, Facebook pages, social bookmarks with content summaries, answers to questions on the Q&A sites, the list goes on and on. It’s all content that you publish – whether on your own site or someone else’s.
While this is marketing and the intent is to drive traffic back to your website so that you can close sales, it’s also publishing. You’re in the information publishing business no matter what other business you consider yourself in.
When you think of yourself as a publisher, then you gain a lot more clout. You gain instant credibility. You can suddenly own and control the flow of content and information. If you aren’t doing that, then it’s controlling you.
Michael Martinez of SEO Theory has some interesting thoughts on what search engine optimization should be doing for us. I like what he has to say, but at this point he may be dreaming some kind of wild science fiction dream.
He says that semantic language indexing, which Google has been doing for a few good years now, is not the right way to go. Instead, he says, search should be a much more three-dimensional experience.
Particularly, Martinez suggests:
- We should be searching for objects, not information
- The search engines (RE: Google) need to get away from keywords
- Search should be individually configurable
- Every individual should be able to compile his or her individual library of information that is taken from the “main” library of information (the Internet), which is cataloged in such a way that it mimics the Dewey Decimal catalog system of a library
In other words, Google has it all wrong. And all the other search engines too since they are chasing Google.
Michael Martinez says the current search system is a failure because it is based on crowd-based metrics. We are choosing information based on what someone tells us is popular. But in order for that metric to have value, the searcher must be able to select the crowd whose opinion really matters.
I can see where Martinez is going with this. Clearly, we’re nowhere near that paradigm. But while we’re waiting for the search experts to figure out a better method, we’re stuck with marketing to Google. Search marketers have no choice but to work within the system that is available to them. And that causes me to ask, do you consider our current search model a success or a failure?
Every so often I run across a tool so useful that I have to tell you about it. Such is the case with this free competitive intelligence tool. It’s a tool that gives you a ton of useful information about your competition in a single click. Right at your fingertips. Add your own cliche.
The tool is the SEOQuake toolbar. Here’s what it does for you:
- Tell you the Google PageRank of any web page on the Internet
- Gives you the number of pages indexed in Google for any website online
- Also tells you the number of links pointing to any web page as reported to Google
- Reports the number of pages indexed at Yahoo
- And the number of Yahoo links
- Reports the number of links to any domain as reported to Yahoo
- LinkDomain2 – The number of links reported to a full Yahoo domain, unlike LinkDomain1 (previous bullet point) which reports for a single domain such as a subdomain.
- Shows whether a website is listed in the Yahoo directory
- Reports the number of pages indexed at and links pointing to each page at Bing
- MSN (Bing) LinkDomain and LinkDomain2
- Tells if a website is listed in DMOZ
- Alexa Rank
- Links to Digg, Technorati and Delicious histories for any website
- Link to Whois
- Gives keyword density report
- And a whole lot more
You can also judge the value of your competition’s website with traffic data and monetary value information. There is so much that SEOQuake can tell you about your competition that it’s difficult to NOT recommend it.
The only catch is that it can only be used with Firefox since it is a Firefox add on. And you can add other plug-ins to the add-on such as SEO Toolbar and AdsSpy.
If you want real solid competitive intelligence data then download the SEOQuake toolbar.
Hitwise, one of the most credible companies reporting on competitive intelligence issues, cites some interesting stats from the past couple of months. First, if you are a part of certain industries such as automotive, sports, entertainment, business and finance, news and media, and social networking then your industry has experienced a double-digit increase in the percentage of traffic coming from search engines. The same industries also saw a double-digit increase in the amount of traffic coming from Google. These stats are a comparison between October 2008 and October 2009.
This just simply proves that search engine traffic is still good today. And it doesn’t look like any other traffic source will pass the search engines any time soon.
As far as competitive intelligence goes, the best way to use this information is as a benchmark. If you are below your industry average then perhaps you need to step up your search engine marketing. If you are well above your industry average then you can take that as a sign that you are doing well at search engine marketing. That doesn’t mean you couldn’t improve.
There is more than one way to gather useful competitive intelligence. One way is to get your hands on information that you can use as a benchmark. It may not reveal anything about any specific competitor, but if it helps you better understand where you fall within your industry then it’s good information.
We live in a competitive world. Everyone wants a bigger piece of pie. No one wants competition, but everyone wants to compete. Intelligence is a word we use to describe ourselves, but it really means information. We want information that makes us more competitive and our competition less competitive. The pressure is on. Some people succumb to the pressure. Then they cut corners and try to compete unfairly or cheat. When they get caught they try to figure out how it all fell apart and make a few excuses. But the world goes on.
Competitive intelligence. It’s really just information. But information for the sake of information is not good. What can you do with it? What do you want to do with it? Chances are, you won’t be able to do what you want unless you figure out how valuable that information is.
First step to being competitive in the marketplace is to know. Know yourself and know the competition. From there, all other things either fall into place or fall out of necessity. Information is the key to winning in competition no matter what the game is.
You’ve heard that content is king and that is true, but you can go too far. One of the five common mistakes that many businesses make in their web design is providing too much information at once.
There are several ways you can provide too much information on your website:
- Too many irrelevant pages
- Too much information on a single page, making it too long to read
- Providing too much depth when giving an overview would do
- Elaborating on topics that need no elaboration
- Redundancy
- Duplicating content
- Adding irrelevant content to pages, watering down your SEO
Web design is very important. People will leave your site as often for a poor web design as they will anything else. An attractive site is very important to keep people interested. Even then, relevant content is what keeps visitors on your site and if you have too much irrelevant content or provide more than what people are willing to read through then you could be cutting off your own nose.
Before you build your site, learn a few web design basics. Don’t be a bore.
