How to Effectively Optimize Your Infographics for SEO
14th of April, 2018 | Infowithart
Infographics, infographics, again infographics, and one more time with feeling – infographics! You probably know the topic inside out, you are already well aware of how to create infographics, when to use infographics, and how to share infographics effectively, but aren’t we missing something here? What about visibility and discoverability of your precious piece of infographic content you put so much time and effort into. What do all the data research and perfect design of your information graphic worth if it ends up down (pun intended) the search engine rankings? If you have your content, you want it to reach the target audience, you wish it to be effective, not just pretty. Happily, there are some loopholes and tricks to cover the issue. Smart guys call these tricks SEO techniques and they are totally applicable to infographics.
SEO (search engine optimization) is a sort of Internet marketing strategy (or strategies) aimed at online visibility increase. Optimizing SEO for an infographic requires a slightly different approach than the one you would apply to usual webpage or website.
The main trouble here is that infographics is both graphics and copy for a human. While to a machine it’s just a graphics, an image that is normally saved in formats such as JPG, PNG, GIF, etc. Depending on the context that you will be using your infographic in. For example, your own website blog, social media platform, directories, image based platforms like Pinterest, you will have various SEO tools access. Let’s take a closer look at how to effectively optimize your infographics for SEO one step at a time.
Keywords research
First things first. Begin with keyword research. There is no need to mention the right keywords choice will provide the desired reach. So, pick out a primary keyword phrase and additionally a couple of secondary phrases. You won’t be able to insert the keywords only in an infographic body but you still can and should use them in the title and headings of the actual infographic. Beyond that, you would use your keywords in all the other elements like webpage title, meta description, URL, image filename, image alt-text, webpage copy, H1 tags.
URLs
In order to optimize your Infographic for SEO, it is important to make sure you are using the keyword phrase within your web publication’s URL. A general rule of thumb here would be to use short URL that contains 3 to 5 words and a maximum of 60 characters. And don’t forget to include your main keyword in your URL, for instance, https://infowithart.com/how-to-optimize-infographics-for-seo/
Meta description
The best practice here would be to include your primary keyword phrase (1 time) in your meta description. It should clearly describe the content of your infographic.
Page headings
Even though you can’t use H1 (or H2, H3, and so on) tags on your infographic itself, you will be using it on a webpage with your infographic anyways. So, the inclusion of keyword in the H1 heading is another important SEO tactic that shouldn’t be neglected.
File name
That’s right, even file name of your infographic matters as search engines would analyze it to figure out its content. Don’t forget about your main keyword if anything. So, something like optimize-infographics-for-seo.png would do the trick.
Alt text
Search engines can’t crawl the content of an image (an infographic in our case), and proper alt text will help them understand the content of that image. Also, alt text will be used by screen readers. So, try to be laconic and don’t forget to use your favorite keyword. Our alt text could be something like that “Infographic explaining SEO for infographics.”
Page copy
Remember that you have more freedom than limitations. If your infographic is technically just an image it doesn’t mean you can’t use a webpage copy to bring extra visibility and higher ranking to your infographics. A text published alongside an infographic will give a short description to your real human visitors as well as it will explain search engines what’s your content is about.
Load speed
Website and page load speed is another condition that affects search engine ranking. Since infographics are predominantly image files that might be quite bulky, it’s important that you take care of this issue. The solutions might be image optimization, using CDN, better hosting plans, etc.
Conclusion
As you can see optimizing your infographics for SEO doesn’t require reinventing a bicycle. The same SEO techniques apply to infographics as to any other conventional content types. Just keep in mind that your infographic is an image. For this reason, you should help search engines “understand” what’s your infographic is about through well-thought title, headings, copy, alt-text, meta description, even a file name, also assuming that you are using right keywords of course. So, may the infographic power be with you.
Sources:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine_optimization
seobook.com/learn-seo/infographics
blog.hubspot.com/marketing/infographics-for-seo-strategy
