Should You Use Infographics on Your Blog?

Should You Use Infographics on Your Blog?.It is about time that webmasters should recognize the value of infographic by adding these as important elements on their website.
Using images and videos is sure way of making your website go viral and in promoting your brand in the online community.
What makes infographic valuable is their feature of being easily shared with others especially in social media sites. Here are 5 major benefits when you use infographics on your site.
5 Benefits to  Use Infographics on Your Site Should You Use Infographics on Your Blog?

1.      Infographics are appealing and compelling
Not all web users want to spend time reading content as it may easily bore them when doing so.
The use of images and videos can be appealing because people love statistics, figures and factual information. This can instantly hook your website visitors and will likely visit your site more often especially when they prefer websites that could provide them straightforward facts and information.
It is also a good way to communicate with your website visitors without the fuss of delivering content that can take so much of their time reading.

2.      Reach other audiences
An attractive feature of infographic is that it can be easily shared by others. Therefore, it helps you extend your reach to other audiences as well as more people share and like your presentation.
As your infographics are being republished, you are likely widening your scope of marketing for your brand and website services.

3.      Infographics attract inbound links
Use infographics on your site and when many web users like and share it on their sites as well, you are already building an inbound link to your site.
As a result, as more people use your links to your infographics the more you attract the search engine to take notice of your site. This can essentially increase your search engine rank as well that helps boost your SEO approach in promoting your website or blog site. As it becomes viral in the social media networks, many will likely embed your infographics to their content which further strengthens your own site’s visibility on the web.
4.      Associate your brand with other publishers
A good infographic is attractive to publishers who will likely take notice and will link to your images or videos. As more publishers use your infographics, the more you create a trusted brand in the online community.
Your potential clients will find your services reliable as more people use and trust your brand. This can be a good promotional scheme in building your brand as you associate it with other reputable publishers.

5.      Go viral and drive traffic to your site
The more people take notice of your images and videos, the more people share it on their site giving it more exposure on the web with the high chance of making it go viral.
It will result in a better traffic on your website and as a consequence your infographics can become one that is widely shared in the internet.
Do you use infographics on your blog? Share with us below!

Keeping Up With Google: Bing Launches New “Search Quality Insights” Series

Want to understand better how Bing creates its search results? Bing has announced a new “Search Quality Insights” series to provide a more behind-the-scenes look at its search engine. You know, like “Search Quality Highlights” series that Google launched last December. What’s going on with these? And how does Bing’s latest post help Google on anti-trust grounds?

Google Expands Flight Search Outside US To 500 Cities

Google Flight Search is taking off to international destinations. Starting today users can search for flights to 500 airports outside the US. Google hasn’t provided a comprehensive list of destinations, but most European and Asian cities I searched for were available.

Will Pending Layoffs Put Final Nail In Yahoo Search?

Whatever is left of Yahoo Search — and, frankly, that’s unclear at this point — might be gone completely within the next couple of weeks.

At AllThingsD today, Kara Swisher is reporting that Yahoo is planning substantial layoffs as early as next week, with a company restructuring to be revealed the week after that. Swisher, who’s been correct on things like this in the past, mentions “a half-dozen sources” in reporting on Yahoo’s impending plans.

How Serious Is Facebook About Search?

An article in BusinessWeek suggests that Facebook is planning a deeper push into search. Will that be limited to improving search for the site — or will it be something more comprehensive?

It’s clear that Facebook needs better internal search. Right now the search function at the top of the page is not very useful. Improving Facebook site search seems to be the first objective of an internal team, led by former Googler Lars Rasmussen, according to BusinessWeek;

For Social Media Marketers, SEO Is Much More Popular Than PPC

Social media marketers are much more likely to also use SEO in their marketing efforts than PCC, according to a new survey out today.

Social Media Examiner announced the results of its fourth annual survey, which this year had replies from more than 3,800 social media marketers around the world.

AdWords Gets ZIP Code Targeting, Location Insertion, Other Tweaks

Google this week introduced the ability to target more than 30,000 ZIP codes in AdWords, giving advertisers the ability to find potential customers in a familiar, granular way. Another new feature, Location Insertion, is aimed at letting advertisers with multiple locations create one ad, and have information dynamically inserted depending on the user’s query or location. Both features are part of location extensions. which are also getting some other tweaks in response to feedback.

For ZIP code targeting, advertisers will be able to add up to 1,000 postal codes at a time. They’ll also be able to view campaign performance stats by ZIP code.

AdWords To Automatically Match For Misspellings, Other Variants

Most experienced AdWords advertisers have developed keyword lists that include things like misspellings, plurals, and other variations on a keyword or phrase. Now, Google will do all this automatically — as it does with organic results — with exact and phrase matching, though advertisers will be able to opt out.

A new way to access quality content online

Whether we’re getting the latest election news, making sense of the day’s stock market activity or looking for an update on our favorite celebrities, we rely on publishers to inform and entertain us. Online publishers often fund the creation of this content through ads; sometimes they ask you to pay for content directly, by buying a subscription or purchasing a particular article.

Now, you may see a new option: the ability to access some of this content by responding to microsurveys, without having to pull out your wallet or sign in. When a site has implemented this option, you’ll see a prompt that offers you a choice between answering a market research question or completing another action specified by the publisher (such as signing up for an account or purchasing access). All responses are completely anonymous -- they aren’t tied to your identity or later used to target ads. The prompts look like this:

First Report Of Google Penguin Recovery

The Google Penguin update first touched down on April 24th and many webmasters that were hit by this update were frantically making changes to their web site in anticipation for a Penguin refresh. That refresh happened late Friday evening and we have one report that appears to be a legit Penguin recovery.

SEOmoz story named How WPMU.org Recovered From The Penguin Update has a pretty good case of a likely Penguin recovery. How can we know it is a pretty good case of a recovery? The Google Analytics graphs show a huge dip in traffic on April 24th and then a huge spike on May 26th, returning the site to pre-Penguin traffic levels.

We have reached out to Google to see if this site did indeed recover from the Penguin update but from the looks of it, it has.

This site claimed the reason it recovered was because it was able to remove over a half a million links from sites using their WordPress themes. These sites used a WordPress theme supplied by WPMU.org, all with a link and anchor text “WordPress MU” pointing back to the site. They were easily able to get that link removed and over 500,000 links disappeared over night. They did not go after additional potential link profile issues prior to the Penguin refresh because they did not have time.

Other changes they made but don’t believe made a difference were:

- Pinged blogs that were originally highlighted by Matt Cutts in a conversation with the Syndey Harold – only one removed links, but they did come from a significant volume of splogs on the Blogdetik.com domain

- Submitted WPMU to the Penguin review form, twice, specifically referencing this article that was being beaten out by the links that referenced it

- Used SEOmoz campaign data to implement some canonical URLs to clean up crawl errors and also kill some unnecessary links across the site

- Did a bit of “SEO cleanup” that revealed WPMU.org sitemaps did not exist and/or were broken. Implemented sitemaps and submitted the feeds to Webmaster Tools, which was not happening previously

- Cleaned up numerous duplicate title tag issues as reported by Webmaster tools

- Continued to build natural links to the site and promote other positive signals such as referring traffic and social shares

- Very notably and importantly, got this specific use case in front of Google and also the greater SEO community that highlighted it

Source: Barry Schwartz/ searchengineland

Local SEOs Analyze Current Google Ranking Factors

Although the local search landscape has changed pretty significantly, the fundamental elements of ranking well in Google’s local search results haven’t strayed dramatically from past years. That’s one of the main takeaways from the 2012 Local Search Ranking Factors report that’s just out today.

Organized (as always) by David Mihm, this year’s survey includes contributions from more than 40 local search marketers around the world. It looks at general Google signals such as Place Page vs. Website vs. Reviews (and more), as well the weight that specific factors may have on local rankings. The top five specific factors in this year’s survey are:

+ Physical Address in City of Search (i.e., it’s hard to rank for “seattle real estate” if you’re based in Bellevue)

+ Proper Category Associations

+ Proximity of Address to Centroid (“centroid” is the geographic center of a city/town)

+ Domain Authority of Website

+ Quantity of Structured Citations

The survey goes on to separate positive ranking factors and negative ranking factors (i.e., having mismatched phone numbers can hurt local ranking visibility).

Not included is Google’s recent switch from Place Pages to Google+ Local Pages, which was announced right at the end of the survey period and — so far — doesn’t appear to have had much impact, if any, on local ranking factors.

Source: Matt McGee/ Searchengineland