Jobs in Digital Marketing

I can’t tell you how often I have to create embed HTML for images such as infographics. Just to save a little time, I thought I’d put together a little embed code generator based on Gravity Forms:

It’s actually very simple, but then again I guess the best things in life are. I hope it saves you time and if there’s a feature you find useful, drop a comment below.

Here’s the link: https://seogadget.co.uk/embed-code-generator/

Generate Infographic Embed Codes Quickly and Easily with this Tool is one of our latest posts from SEOgadget - thanks for reading! Want to stay up to date with the latest SEO and Conversion Rate Optimisation tips and tricks? Follow us on Twitter and Add SEOgadget to your Google Circles!

Links, seemingly the currency of rankings, and a white-hot area right now what with all the recent de-indexing of certain link networks, GWT Warning messages being sent to over 700,000 webmasters and the ever decreasing effectiveness of low-rent link building tactics.

So just what is a “good link”? We know what we look for in a link for our clients but we wanted to survey as many members of the SEO community as we could to get a real idea of the kinds of methods and metrics that SEO professionals all over the globe are using to assess the quality of a link.

What do we look for in a (link) partner?

We analyse a prospective linking partner for our clients based on three different areas:

• The strength of a link – despite the shifts in link building practices, it is vital to assess a link from a strength point of view. This means utilising one or several or your preferred metrics, for us this is PageRank, mozRank and domain authority.
• The quality of a site – just what is a high-quality website? We assess a website based on the overall user experience and the apparent policies of the website being evaluated. This includes things like a suitable number of adverts relative to content, well-written and well-constructed pages, and ensuring the website doesn’t appear to be overtly flogging its sidebars or footers.
• The relevance of that website – some argue that the relevant link is a myth but we are still keen advocates of links making sense from a user’s perspective and that is the key to relevance. Obviously in some industries it is near on impossible to get links from directly relevant websites (unless you’re talking about the SEO community where knowledge, links and interactions flow freely between competing businesses!) because they are in the same industry and often are unwilling to link. This is why we look for natural crossovers between industries and topics to help extend the reach of our clients.

Show me the results

We opened the survey and saw just over 500 individuals complete it – thank you to everyone that took part and hopefully you’ll find this data interesting.

Link Evaluation Survey 2012 infographic By Orange Line SEO

If you like this Infographic, you can embed it on your own blog or website using the code below:

Link Evaluation Survey 2012 [INFOGRAPHIC] is one of our latest posts from SEOgadget - thanks for reading! Want to stay up to date with the latest SEO and Conversion Rate Optimisation tips and tricks? Follow us on Twitter and Add SEOgadget to your Google Circles!

Following up on Oli’s excellent post (6 Steps to Making Your Infographic Work), I’m going to be expanding on the post-publication aspect of the infographic process, which I’ve been tinkering with over the past month. If you are at all involved in outreach, then infographic clean-up is a great way to spend your time sourcing placements, beginning relationships and getting links while you do it. It’s also a nice way to get a foot in the door at some authority sites beyond your original placement. Going exploring also lets you really see how your work is performing in the wild. I thoroughly recommend it. You can do what I’m suggesting whenever you want, and done well, you’ll get you the satisfaction of knowing you’ve efficiently built a lot of quality links and contacts with relatively little effort. Done on behalf of a client, you can demonstrate your attentiveness in looking after their investment, showing it continues to pass benefit to them months down the line.

I can get links for little effort?

Oh yes (unless you’ve just finished scraping the barrel with this method). If you haven’t done this recently then it’s definitely worth picking up again: although republication velocity will tend to decrease over time, it is unlikely to outright stop. It takes very little time to check up.

If you jump on clean-up the days following release you can potentially get a lot of links from both the scrapers and the honest folk later down the line. You’ll notice in your explorations that most will attribute someone, even if it is more often than not the site it was first placed on or the one on which they found it. These people are very likely to attribute you with the right approach. Others will watermark it “copyright originalfanfictiondonotsteal.com”, though even these people will attribute you if you ask nicely.

So how do I do it?

The process I’m using is pretty simple:

1. Find out who has your stuff, but hasn’t linked to you.
2. Decide whether you want them to link to you.
3. If you do, ask them to link to you.
4. Get Freebies.
5. Repeat.

Who has my content?

I’m rather ham-fisted when it comes to my searching, but I’ve been experimenting with what works for me, as should you. I’ll tend to start with a few variations of the original post title on the original placement, and the title of the infographic itself (since they are often different). Many websites will tag posts “[Infographic]”, making it more helpful than not to include this term in your searches. These searches will give me some preliminary idea of the impact the infographic has had. I’ll then go on to searching in the manner I would if I couldn’t remember either of these things (since many instances of republication will further alter the title). I might start on an old infographic of ours with these searches:

• Server headers 101
• Server headers 101 infographic
• Originalplacement.com server headers infographic
• Server headers infographic
• Server headers infographic “via *”
• Variants -“anchor text”
• Variants -“client name”

After you’ve made a start with this data you can use Google’s very handy reverse image search functionality. You can do a grand MozBar .csv export of these searches and work through the data, but I suggest you open all of the search results in new tabs, regardless of quality, for a few reasons. Firstly, to gather more data, it’s useful to know who they’ve attributed and why. Some of these linked to sites I’m likely to have missed by my own searching. Provided you don’t delete your search history, you’ll also be able to easily keep track and on top of new link opportunities (the pristine blue links that appear in your search results) when you check back a few days or weeks later.

Do I actually want them linking to me?

You should now have an impressive collection of people who have published your content but have not attributed you, along with some up to date data of people who are linking to you. Get it all in a spreadsheet. You can use whatever metrics you’d like to filter this data and prioritise your outreach. My own guideline is ‘slightly less than I would like for article outreach’, but this is fairly arbitrary and a little conservative. You can go as low as you feel is worth it, remembering that compared to article outreach, for instance, the links/time return is very favourable.

Anyone you are considering outreaching to, make a note of in that spreadsheet. You might also wish to include here a blacklist of sites that are appealing given the metrics but don’t make the cut for whatever reason.

Now that your data is filtered and your outreach prioritised, you can begin. With any luck, your work has been uniquely republished by more authority sites than you were aware of and you have some pretty powerful links out there waiting for you.

How should I ask them to link to me?

Woah there! Before you contact them, you’ll need to collect their contact details. I like to do this all at once whilst updating my spread sheet before tailoring and sending off a bunch of emails, this way I have all these details for the future. Any details I can’t find quickly I’ll earmark for a deeper, more creative search later. Your focus (since you have now filtered for quality), is on both links and relationships. Your contact from here on out is at an advantage to ‘cold’ outreach because:

• They like your stuff, or at least think their audience does. They’ll already be well disposed.
• You aren’t asking for very much, and what you’re asking is completely reasonable.

When you do make contact, include the URL of the placement on their site as the subject line. This seems to work very well for improving response rates – but I’ll keep testing. Further, when you are requesting a link, make sure to include it. Asking for “a link to our website” rather than a URL is just asking to be ignored. Always save them as much effort as you can.

As for the tone of your email, outrage and threats probably do work on some people (they’ve stolen your content, damnit!), but will most likely sour any potential for future relationship. I haven’t tried this approach yet, and probably won’t because these relationships are the bulk of what I’m trying to achieve. Just considering what my own response to this approach would be dissuades me:

 

But I can’t afford a lawyer! How do I make them listen to me?

By asking nicely. When putting your emails together, one thing to remember is that you are glad they have posted your content. This is (almost!) exactly what you wanted to happen. Treat it as a qualified lead. You can also be thankful for all the spam sites you’ll come across for not attributing you or your client.

Part of asking nicely entails that when someone gives you a link, you send them a quick thank you email. In their mind, they didn’t have to give you that link, but they did anyway. Down the line, they may remember you for it. And when I say “when someone gives you a link”, I don’t mean “when they email you to say they’ve given you a link (and actually have)”. About a third of the time your link request gets granted you won’t be informed – so make sure to check back periodically on everywhere you’ve outreached to. I’ve found infographics for multiple clients published without attribution on the same blog, and building a relationship speeds up the clean-up process substantially (you can tail the new request to the last email in the chain – either your thank you message or their response). Otherwise, you’ll sometimes find people citing you, but not hyperlinking their citation. When you contact them, make sure to thank them for citing you.

The most common reason for failing would be giving up in the face of silence (which happens less than you’d think). Be persistent, especially if you are emailing info@authoritysite.com rather than willsmith@authoritysite.com, as there are plenty of reasons why your message sent to an account managed by multiple people might get neglected. When you do get a response, you are most likely to get one through someone’s personal account. File this away in your Rolodex. You may otherwise get a name signed off from an info@ address. Again, remember it so you can put it in the subject line for future communication. A little trial and error and you’ll quickly discover a method that works best for you. You should also be persistent even if it’s a personal address; just ask politely for an update on your email (if they haven’t responded in a week, say). You can also try the other addresses on their websites. To avoid potential embarrassment, you should always check they haven’t already given you a link before you pull the trigger on your chase up email.

Besides being occasionally ignored, I’ve run into very few problems. One worth mentioning is: “But it doesn’t say the name of that [site/company] anywhere on [the infographic/where I got it]…” This is rare, but does happen, especially if you don’t have a watermark on the image, or they have discovered your image via someone who has placed their own watermark on the image. This happens rather a lot:

 

Having encountered MSpaint wizards like this, these objectors are right to be cautious – you could be a roguish link builder (I think a dishonest version of what I suggest would work well enough to be worth doing, if you’re into that sort of thing). In addressing this, more often there will be a chain of attribution cut prematurely. If they’re bothering to object, it means they are bothering to respond, and care about your response in turn. And since you aren’t a rake, showing them how the original placement links to you will (in my experience) satisfy them.

Now, if the site you are outreaching to is the sort of high value site you would want a future infographic placed on, you should consider either pitching or seeding your infographics in development. This puts you ahead of the curve in terms of the relationship. To paraphrase this sort of approach:

“Hey, glad you liked our [blue widgets infographic] enough to put it on your site, I’d be really grateful if you could attribute us for creating it (http://). We’re planning to produce some more stuff like [blue widgets infographic], should I throw some ideas your way later this month?”

Roughly, I’m reasoning that the offer of a future relationship (and free linkbait) gives them great incentive to attribute you right now. Importantly, they already like your stuff, and would probably like the opportunity to get that exclusive first placement of your stuff next time around. It’s very unlikely they’ll say: “No, I’m not going to attribute you this time because it’s my website and I do what I want, but please send me some drafts of other infographics you’re  working on so I can steal those.” More often they will say “Sure, send it over, oh by the way that link is now live, sorry about that.” If you are involved in article based linkbuilding, you can make similar offers, either for existing articles or to find out if they would be open to the idea.

Getting Freebies

So you’ve done your outreach and now you have your links. Neat.

youcanbemywingmananytimenoyoucanbemine.jpg

Now it’s time to hold your horses on those thank you emails. Is there any way to make this better? If you’ve published anything else, either for yourself or a client, that they might like then why not let them know in your response? (“Hey, thanks for linking to us for x, did you see the y we put out?”). I’ve had a good amount of success in follow up by pointing publishers to other related infographics we’ve put out, subsequently having them uniquely republished. I’ve tried this, along with seeding future publications, both before and after obtaining an attribution through request with roughly equal success. Usually you’ll get a “Yes please” or a “Yes please, hey I’ve made the change/ published that thing you mentioned”. But remember, just because you think they should like it, doesn’t mean they will. If the last email you received was along the lines of “BLOOD SUCKING SEO SCUM STEALING MY PAGE RANK FINE HERE YOU GO NOW GO DIE IN A FIRE!!!!!!!!!1!” then I’d accept this and move on. You weren’t meant for each other.

The greatest long-term benefit of clean-up is that the contacts you’ve been developing can now be messaged whenever you release an infographic they might be interested in for secondary placements, and since you’ve pre-filtered them for quality, you have an enviable collection of potential links following launch day that can be gained by a few friendly emails.

Rinsing & Repeating:

After your first skirmish, periodic reverse image searches will get you very far, especially if you delve beyond the first few pages of results. As in life, keeping on top of your records and lowering your standards will get you even more success. Over the months, you will probably begin to see diminishing returns in link volume for your efforts, so you can scale back how often you keep tabs and get to work on some more link bait (or go chase those infographics you put out before 2010).

Further Thoughts:

As you’ll discover, republication of English language infographics on non-English websites (without attribution) happens a lot. A deeper dive into some reverse image searches will help you find these. Whether you think they are worth pursuing is up to you, as the return on investment for your time won’t be as obviously beneficial. Undoubtedly, if you have a successful infographic, you have links from more than English-language speaking countries. Linking to English language sites is predominantly a one way street. Interestingly, several of our own infographics have been translated somewhere down the line into Chinese and Russian (where they go on to be significantly successful):

 

I don’t speak either language, unfortunately, but I’ll certainly be experimenting with different approaches to getting these links. For finding these fan translations of your own infographics (a decent success benchmark – you’ve made something worth putting more than 5 minutes of effort into stealing), the best place to look is beyond the first few pages of a reverse image search. If you’ve had any success doing this, let me know!

Another area I will be experimenting with is requesting different anchor texts when I ask for attributions and how different methods impact my success rate – I’m asking them to do more, after all. Usually I wouldn’t suggest sculpting the anchor text, since the laissez-faire approach leads to some natural variations around brand anyway, but you might broach this sculpting by sending two pre-formatted sentences over with your request – “Either something like [x] or [y] would be great”.

And there you have it, some insight into how you might approach your own infographic clean-ups, a few tips to squeeze out even more benefit and some ideas for the future.

Image credit

Infographic Clean-up as Link Building Outreach is one of our latest posts from SEOgadget - thanks for reading! Want to stay up to date with the latest SEO and Conversion Rate Optimisation tips and tricks? Follow us on Twitter and Add SEOgadget to your Google Circles!

Infographics are great! But just like any other form of content, the depth and value it provides will ultimately determine whether or not it will win or fail. Although infographics aren’t new, now, more than ever, people are realising how great they are for attracting links. As a result, the art of the infographic has fallen in danger of becoming more saturated than a dubstep wobble.

So how do you make yours work?

We often produce infographics for our clients in order to gain a link from an authoritative domain (often an editorially driven site). Furthermore, there’s the added strategy of trying to produce an idea that will generate a social buzz and new links, naturally, via a number of methods. The general process we follow at the Gadgetplex looks a little something like this:

Justin Briggs covered the infographic process in great detail back in March, but I wanted the chance to touch up on a few of my own experiences.

 

Everything starts with the idea

There’s no right or wrong way to come up with a solid idea for an infographic, but first and foremost; keep the brief simple. Get your team together for a group brainstorm. It’s easy to come up with an idea and think it’s the best thing since Angry Birds, but how do you know everyone else shares the same enthusiasm for your vision?

You should also consider an idea that will appeal across a broad range of niche sites. For example, a graphic about the “Evolution of the Electric Car” could appeal, not only to the motoring industry, but also the tech and green community. Tad Chef provided a good insight on how you should be mindful of where you want to gain links from with your link bait.

If you’re stuck for ideas, you can try looking at what content has worked for you in the past. Where on the web is there an incredibly long piece of old content that’s dying to be reborn into a graphic (thanks Will). Aside from blog posts, forums and PDF’s are also great ways of finding huge streams of content to work with.

While it can be argued that all good infographics should tell a story with data, you can easily have success with graphics that are less data heavy and, say, simply illustrate a funny idea.

Now you have a solid idea. But before you get all excited and go designing something, you need to be sure that someone is actually interested in your concept.

 

Do the outreach before you even think about the design

You wouldn’t bet on a racehorse unless you knew beforehand that it had a strong chance of winning. So why would you invest in designing an infographic that no one has yet expressed an interest in? Getting approval for just your idea from a site owner, or editor, prior to starting the design process works on a number of levels:

You know whether your idea is good or not

Based on the replies you get, you’ll have a good idea of whether the project is going to work, or whether you need to go back to the drawing board.

You can tailor the content for the site

Editors love exclusivity and they know your tailoring the infographic for them especially, then that elevates your chance of getting the finished product published

You can establish a communication with the editor/site owner

During this time you should take advantage of building a good working relationship with your contact. Keep them updated with the progress of the project, and send over drafts so they have a hand in the creative process. A solid level of communication will keep you prominent in their mind and you’re likelier to be higher on their priority list.

Furthermore, considering you’re in talks with an authoritative publication; the relationship you develop with the editor or site owner can open doors for future content placement.

Tip: Use a noticeable subject field like [Infographic] “Title of amazing idea” – the infographic stamp ensures that this isn’t just another article proposal.

 

Be clear with what you want from your designer

During the design stage of my first infographic project, the research I sent over consisted of rough notes, links to resources and some ideas for how I wanted the graphic to be presented. I thought this would be enough for them to develop a story and design from. The first draft included all the wording exactly how I’d written it and, as a result, cost me more time than was necessary. Ultimately the redesigns amounted to a higher charge than what was originally agreed.

To avoid this problem with future projects, I got one of our copywriters to take care of the research, and put it all into a clear, concise format that the designer could just copy and paste from. Sure the costs add up but it makes for a smoother process in the long run.

The amount of money you spend on an infographic project should be based on what you feel the value of the link is worth to your business or client. Let’s say you work with an average budget of:

£100 for research and copy

£500 for infographic design

When working with designers and, if necessary, researchers, you need to make sure you get a few things clear from the offset:

What’s the fee, and what is it based on?

Will the designer take care of research and copy?

How many revisions are included with the fee?

How long is the turnaround?

The fee can range from time taken to the amount of effort that’s required. While this essentially falls under the same category, be clear about how designers and researchers charge for their work. The last thing you want when sending the work back for revision is to be faced with a larger cost.

If, on the other hand, you don’t even know of any designers yet, then check out Dribbble. There’s a plethora of infographics designers just waiting to be hired.

Tip: Include authoritative sites in your credits section. When briefing in your researcher, provide them with authoritative sites to use as research. Having these resources listed in the credits section of your infographic will give you some nice ego bait to work with.

 

Don’t rely on your own opinion when revising drafts

When you’re at the stage of receiving revising drafts don’t rely on your opinion alone, as you can easily oversee important things. Get some input from your team, or client. And, as I said before, see what your editor thinks about the initial design. Imagine sending the final draft off to the editor, only for them to turn around and request for a list of changes to be made.

 

Don’t forget to include the link before publication

When delivering the finished product to the editor, you can hand it over in one of two ways. Upload the infographic to your own server and give it to them as an embeddable code (complete with a link back to your site).

Realistically, however, most authoritative sites would rather be given the raw file. If this is the case then be sure to include a byline (complete with link, of course) when sending over the raw file. That will ensure that your link gets scraped along with the infographic when it goes live. Booyah!

Whatever route you go down just make sure the link is there when the infographic is published, otherwise it won’t be included in scraped copies of the content.

 

Now it’s published, this is just the beginning

So your graphic has been published. It’s generating some healthy discussion, getting plenty of social shares, been scraped and now you can relax. Not so fast tiger.

Chase up scraped and uniquely republished links

If your infographic really cuts it then there’s a chance that other reputable blogs are republishing it. When this happens, you’re owning the internet. The only miniscule issue is that they’re probably writing their own unique copy, making it harder to locate.

Some easy ways around this are to simply search using “infographic title” followed by ‘infographic’. Alternatively, make use of Google Image search, by copy and pasting in the image URL. Searching with the image URL arguably provides you with a more concise number of how many times your graphic has been scraped or republished.

As great as this is though, these sites only tend to cite the original source of the infographic and overlook the additional author credit.

This problem can be fixed with a few polite emails to the webmaster. As long as you’ve been accredited accordingly in the original source, you are entitled to that link.

Publish on your own blog

If you have your own blog then why not try seeing how much traffic and links you can gain by publishing the graphic on your site.

Be sure to create an embeddable code for the graphic to encourage further publication. If you’re blog only has a small readership then this would be a great opportunity to take advantage of paid Stumbles or promoted Tweets.

Submit to infographics sites

There’s also a few sites whose sole purpose is to showcase infographics, such as Cool Infographics, Infographics Showcase, Infographic Site and Visually. Of the aforementioned sites, Visual.ly has to be my personal favourite, due to the fact that it operates as a social network platform, rather than a blog.

Use your PR team

Do you, or your client, have your own PR team? They’re likely to have contact with some very authoritative and reputable publications, so make use of them and your amazing content.

Tap up old contacts

As previously mentioned, a great infographic will ideally build links by itself. However, there’s nothing wrong with hitting up some of your old contacts whose editorial style fits in with the content of your work.

Contact your list of credits?

Do you have a list of credits/resources displayed on your graphic? Why not reach out to those sites and let them know about what the valuable resources they provided. Even if they just Tweet you, it’s still reaching out to a potentially untapped audience.

Create a #hashtag

Push it further on Twitter by creating a #hashtag that relates to the subject or title of your graphic. Generate some discussion and buzz, and track who’s talking about your work.

While the title suggests this post is relevant to just infographics, many of the prior guidelines can be applied to any viral project that is being created for third party sites. If you have any of your own tips, advice or general brilliance on the infographic process then share them in the comments.

To coincide with this blog post I did a presentation for the rest of the team at SEOgadget on best practices for the infographics process. Feel free to have a watch.

6 Steps to Making Your Infographic Work

6 Steps to Making Your Infographic Work is one of our latest posts from SEOgadget - thanks for reading! Want to stay up to date with the latest SEO and Conversion Rate Optimisation tips and tricks? Follow us on Twitter and Add SEOgadget to your Google Circles!