With the celebrations of the 1st of January now behind us and with a wealth of ideas for ‘what will be new in 2011’ stated - it is now time to do something big and yes, a little bit clever.

Perhaps not as daunting as some would have you believe. Creating new exciting & well designed pieces of content can make all the difference to your search positions.

In this blog post I will highlight some great ways of combining graphic design with SEO, a technique that has been used to great acclaim and success in my work with Propellernet.

We call it Design SEO and it should change the way you think about content.

The Infographic

An infographic is a great way of producing brilliant content for your site by turning relevant information into a piece of graphically stunning content, which has a far greater chance of influencing your audience. As the University of Florida found in their study of the ‘visual learner’, 65% of the population take on-board new data or information significantly better when presented with a visual.

For those of us who are visual learners - here is a nice visual!

Source: Study carried out by the University of Florida - Bradford, C. William .2004

Of course, for every piece of content that is created and successfully influences the usage of a product or brand, link juice shall be your reward. As stated by the writers of The Art of SEO - “Build great stuff, tell everyone about it, and motivate them to share.” If you can produce compelling content such as this - people will want to link to your website and reference your great creative content.

A few things to remember

-    An infographic should always appeal to your market, but you should not neglect the greater online audience, as this is your gateway to viral distribution.

-    In order to influence or inspire it is often useful to use what is called a pull or trigger. A selection of such triggers can be found below:

·    Humorous
·    Critical
·    Controversial
·    Informative
·    Helpful
·    Unique

The PDF Brochure

PDF guides are a great way of building on the great content on your website & creating some interesting take-away link bait for your audience.

With the online community now far more savvy and experienced in getting exactly what they want from their next search, there is a greater calling for your PDF to fulfil the brief – with more relevant content.

When creating a piece of link bait such as this it is best to offer your users something that no one else can. For instance if you can offer your market a ‘sneek peek’ or a ‘how to guide’ for your product, that offers the user great insight or information, they will repay you with high value links and become advocates of your brand.

An example of this would be the work we produced for Sovereign Luxury Holidays; where a series of PDF brochures were commissioned to provide customers with an insider’s guide to the very best of both Cyprus & Tenerife.

This tactic has seen great results for Sovereign Holidays; with visits for the keyword ‘Cyprus holidays’ growing 1,366% month on month and Cyprus related terms seeing an increase in traffic by 136%. This also saw Sovereign’s Google search position move from 29th to 6th from Jan 2010 to Nov 2010.

Source: Sovereign Holidays

Good luck with your next content piece - and why not have a bit of fun with it? Part 2 - coming soon.

Grant.