SEO strategies: How I Got 22 Follow Links with infographic marketing

jun 2, 2017
growth marketing, seo

Link building is an important part of any SEO strategy. It boosts your page’s authority which in turn helps you rank higher for your chosen keywords. It can be a great source of traffic. Traditionally written content is used to get these links however using infographics allows you to stand out.

I will show you exactly how I used ‘infographic submission sites’ to gain easy and quick follow links back to my site within half a day. I have even included a full list of the submission sites I used.

STEP 1: Create an infographic
How to choose the right infographic:

Choose one of the keywords you have identified in your SEO strategy. Check no-one else has created an infographic on the exact same topic, or if they have, it can easily be beaten on quality or quantity.

How to create the infographic:

There are many online free builders.Two of my personal favourites are:

1. Canva: Because of it is so easy to use.
2. Easel: Because of their extensive and well-made templates.

I would highly recommend you test out your chosen site before fully committing to creating your complete infographic.

Take 10 mins to create something simple and try to download it. You should be able to tell if you gel with this tool in that time and also you should check if there are charges for downloads.

The guys at Creative Blog have created an extensive list of free infographic creation sites.

STEP 2: Create a post specifically for the Infographic.
How to do this with WordPress


Create a new post in your Word Press site which is dedicated to the infographic. (If you are using another blogging site then still create a new post. The exact steps of how to do this may differ from below.)

This page will be submitted to the infographic submission sites.

To do this effectively and in a way which gains you ‘follow links’ go through the steps outlined below.

Create a page and add some text at the beginning of the post, to introduce your infographic.

Step 3: Optimise this page for SEO

To do this all of the below must be optimised:

1. Text at the beginning of the post.
Must include your keyword or LSI keyword. *
(*LSI keywords (Latent Semantic Indexing) are keywords that have a similar meaning to your primary keyword. They are NOT just synonym or keywords as most people cite.)

2. Title of the post
The title tag of your page. This is shown by Google, Yahoo (or other search engines) on the results page.



To optimise this title for SEO:

Must contain the Keyword and the word ‘Infographic’.
Must be no longer than 60 characters.
Must be unique. No other posts on your website should have the same title (this is important).
Should only contain ‘|’ as punctuation. Use it for separation instead of a ‘.’.

3. Meta description

This is the description which is shown under the title on the search results page.

To optimise the meta description for SEO:

Should contain the keyword or a synonym of your keyword (otherwise referred to as LSI Keyword) LINK . (Rather than force keywords choose something to entice people to click. 80% of the time you should include the keywords).
Must be no longer than 160 characters.
Must be a genuine description of the page. A good rule of thumb I like to follow is: 1 sentence summarising what is on the page. 1 sentence as the call to action, making someone want to click to open the page.

4. H1

The title which appears on your blog post itself. You should only ever have one h1 on a page. Two H1s are very bad for SEO.

To optimise the H1 for SEO:

Must contain keywords or LSI keywords.
Should be no longer than 50 characters.
Must be a genuine title for the page & make sense. It will appear at the top of the page so it must make viewers want to scroll down to see the infographic.
Must only be one in number.

5. Internal Anchor Text

The text used on a page when it is embedded into a link to another page. Basically, the text you click on and are redirected to another page.
‘Internal’ means within your own site. This is the text you use to link to other pages or posts within your own site.

To optimise the Internal Anchor Text for SEO:

Must contain keyword.
Should be linked from at least one other post or page within your site.

6. Image Alt text

The alternative text which shows up if your image does not load. In this case, your image is the infographic itself. You edit this when you upload your picture.

To optimise this for SEO:

Must be a genuine description of the image.
Should contain keyword.

7. External Anchor Text

Similar to internal anchor text. ‘External’ is the text websites other than your own used to embed a link to your post.
External linking is another word for follow/ no-follow links and the focus of this article.

How to optimise external anchor text for SEO:

Must contain keywords.

With written content you can only undertake this one way; by asking whoever owns the site you are requesting the link from to include your chosen anchor text.

However, this runs the risk of the owner refusing.

This is one of the main reasons infographic marketing works better than ‘written in’ and achieves links which boost your SEO ranking for your chosen keywords.

With infographic marketing the best way to get the anchor text you want with your follow link is to use this code embedder.

Embed this code at the bottom of the image.

Hubspot have written a brilliant guide on how to create this code:

1. Site name = The name of your site.

2. Post URL = The URL given at the top of your page. It is the URL a user would use to access your infographic blog post.

3. Image URL = This can be found when you insert the infographic onto your post. You can go back into ‘insert media’ click on the image and find the ‘image URL’.

4. Image alt text = This is what we optimised earlier. It can also be found in the ‘insert media’ popup also.

5. Width of the image = The width of the image as it appears on the post. It can also be seen in the ‘insert media’ popup. Alternatively you can see it when clicking on it and then clicking the little pencil ‘edit’ icon.

6. Image height = As Hubspot explains this should be left blank so not the distort the image.

7. Embedded box width & height = I like to make this the same as the image width so it looks good on the page. The height can be set as you like aesthetically, I prefer not too big so tend to go for 100px.

Cut and paste the code which the embedder then provides you with. Put this code either under your image.

STEP 4: Submit your infographic to the infographic submission sites

This is when you get the follow links.

Submit the page URL and the embedded code to all of the bellow, free and paid sites. Many of these allow you to submit your embedded code separately.
When I did this I had no budget so I only submitted to the free sites. This meant the quality of the infographic was even more important as was its uniqueness.

Paid sites will give you more of a guarantee return but if the quality of what you produce is up to scratch it shouldn’t be necessary to use paid sites.

The full list of infographic submission sites can be found here.

STEP 5: Sit back and let the magic happen


After a few days check the number of backlinks you now have with Ahrefs or SEOprofiler. (Both of which offer a free trial).

They both take a while to pick up on new links. The newer your site is the longer they will take so don’t worry if it takes at least a week.

So there you have it, a detailed guide as to how I got 22 follow links in only half a day’s work using infographic marketing.