Photo via AJC1
It’s the latest craze, all the hip marketers are doing it or should I say using them…? I’m talking about infographics, those great graphic images that tell a whole lot of information in an easy to read, concise visual format. They’re popping up all over the place from presidential election websites to mom and pop restaurants local G+ page.
This isn’t rocket science, but finding new and unique ways to improve your SEO campaign can mean the difference between receiving a first page ranking and not being found on any page the SERP’s.
Using infographics is just one of the many techniques you can use to help improve your SEO, and there are many SEO benefits associated with using infographics that can provide huge improvements to your site’s rankings. Below are some links to web tools that will help you create infographics with the best internet marketers.
Piktochart
Piktochart is a web-based tool that has free themes (there’s also a paid version) for creating simple visualizations. It allows you to drag and drop different shapes and images, and there is a lot of customization available to you as a user. Remember with the free version, you’ll get a small Piktochart watermark on the bottom of the PNG / JPG download.
Infogr.am
Infogr.am is another free web-based tool with some really nice themes and a great interface for creating simple infographics. This option also allows you to create charts using real data. There are 31 chart options that offer some really cool displays for example: you can create a radial bar graph, scatter charts, bubble graphs, and map charts. You can also add your own images and video. When you’re done creating your infographic, you can embed it on a website and publish it to the infogr.am site.
Visual.ly
Visual.ly (I know, these visualization tools love their ‘.ly’s!) has some simple free tools worth mentioning, many of which integrate with social networks to analyze Twitter and Facebook data. You can create fun Venn diagrams, Twitter account show-downs, visuals that analyze hash tags, and a few others, but there’s almost no customization available. They do offer a marketplace where you can get connected with visual designers and motion graphics artists who specialize in infographics. The site itself also has a ton of great info graphics to inspire you or your designers. There’s some serious data visualization eye candy in there, people.
Easel.ly
Easel.ly is another free web-based tool for creating infographics. You cannot create graphs using real data with this tool, but its really good for conceptual visualizations and storytelling. It has a beautiful user interface and the themes you can start with are gorgeous. The themes support many common purposes: map, flow-chart, and comparison/relationship graphing. This tool has the best selection of well-design objects (people, a bunch if icons, landmarks, maps, animals, etc.) and backgrounds that I’ve seen throughout this list of tools. Additionally, you can upload your own images with the free version. You can download a web-quality version as JPG. This tool is still in beta, but it seemed to work pretty well to me!
