Living on a college budget has conditioned me to always keep an eye out for anything free that will help me accomplish my goals. Well, data visualization is a specialty of mine, so I’ve pulled together a list of free data visualization tools with a wide variety of uses and applications.

Every tool reviewed in this post came from Annie Cushing’s Must-Have Tools Google doc under the Data Visualization tab. The Google doc has fourteen tabs of amazing tools covering all the bases of internet marketing, so definitely check it out.

Creately

Creately is an organizational tool that allows users to easily create flowcharts, mind maps, Unified Modeling Language diagrams, database models, and mockups.

Free Features:

• Drag and drop interface
• PDF, JPG, or PNG exports
• Five public diagrams
• Search engine exposure
• Ability to securely embed diagrams in webpages
• Real-time collaboration for 3 members
• Online only

Upgrade Features:

• Unlimited private and public diagrams
• Real-time collaboration for an unlimited amount of members
• XML exports
• Project sharing with clients and coworkers
• User management on projects
• Online tool and/or desktop application

An example of a wireless network diagram made with Creately’s software:

Price: Free with uprade option

Infogr.am

Infogr.am is an online tool that allows you to create your own infographics.

Free Features:

• Six infographic templates
• Ability to add photos, video, charts, text, and maps to the infographic
• Your own Infogr.am library
• Social media sharing buttons that you can add directly to the infographic

Pro Features ($18/month):

• 10 infographic templates
• PDF or PNG downloads
• Private URLs for sharing
• Password protection

Infogr.am infographic examples:

The Infogr.am interface:

Price: Free with upgrade option

Pixlr

Pixlr is an online photo editor that allows you to create your own charts, infographics, and images for free.

Features:

• Online tool, no downloading necessary
• Ability to save created images as a JPEG, PNG, BMP, TIFF or PXD (layered Pixlr image) to your computer, Flickr, Picasa, Facebook or your own Pixlr library online, if you create an account
• All the basic functionalities of Photoshop

This is also a great tool to have at your disposal for those times that you need a photo editor but aren’t at your usual work station and don’t want to use Paint. (Eww.)

The Pixlr interface:

Price: Free

Many Eyes

Many Eyes is an online data visualizer and chart maker tool.

Features:

• 22 data visualization types to choose from
• Ability to upload XML data or free text to create visualizations
• Ability to create interactive HTML data visualizations you can embed in your website
• Embed codes or as a static image option you can share via email, Facebook, or Twitter

Important: You have to publish the visualization to download it, and all data entered into Many Eyes is publicly viewable, so don’t put confidential company info into it.

Many Eyes data visualization examples:

Price: Free

Wordle

Word clouds are all the rage but can be really useful to marketers. There are so many applications we can use as marketers, such as visualizing all the title tags of our website (or a competitor’s!), anchor tags (from inbound OR internal links), URLs, ranking keywords from a source like SEMRush or Keyword Spy, etc. Wordle makes that pretty easy and has a surprising number of customizable options for a free tool.

Features:

• Allows you to create a word cloud from a sample of text or the URL of any blog, blog feed, or any other web page that has an Atom or RSS feed
• Generates a random word cloud from your text with options to customize the language, font, layout and colors used
• Advanced option allows you to assign weight and hexadecimal colors to words that you would like emphasized
• Option to either print your word cloud or publish it publicly and receive an embed code to put the word cloud on a webpage
• Ability to maintain phrases by replacing spaces between words you want to keep together with a tilde character (useful for mapping actual keyword phrases and not just individual words)

Here’s a word cloud I created from the United States’ Constitution:

Price: Free

What data visualization tools are you using?

Exporting data can be very helpful. But what do you do with a .csv data dump? This tutorial takes you by the hand and walks you through how to take an export and turn it into some gorgeous (and useful) data.

If you would like to follow along, you can download the raw .csv used. Or download our formatted template to use whenever you would like.

Pro Tip: Make sure to select the 1080HD option while watching the tutorial.

As soon as marketers figured out that links helped your site rank in Google, SEO blogs started writing posts about how to get more links.

Over the years we’ve burned through several link building ideas and trends including reciprocal linking, link wheels, widget spam, paid links and link networks.

And, while many SEO agencies now have “outreach” teams spamming webmasters with guest posting requests, few if any agencies are using the most effective link request email I’ve found.

Copyright Infringement

As the son of a graphic artist and husband to a talented photographer, I’ve become extremely (perhaps overly) sensitive to copyright infringement.

While it may be news to many bloggers and website owners, you can’t just slap any image you find in Google image search on your site. You also can’t just copy and paste an entire blog post on your site for your readers to enjoy.

Content and images, even those published on the web, are subject to copyright restrictions.

And while copyright can be a pain in the neck when you’re trying to find just the right image for your blog post, it can also be a gold mine of links and occasionally additional income. [Read more...]

It’s not often we get to watch an extremely popular site commit SEO suicide but that’s exactly what’s going on over at Consumerist.

On September 20th the site was apparently hacked and began redirecting users off to other spam sites. As is often the case, the site was compromised via “systems maintained by our former hosting provider.”

Upon discovering the hack, the website was taken down, and remained down for nearly a week. While site downtime isn’t great for a site in terms of SEO, it doesn’t have to be a full fledged disaster. In fact, the 503 HTTP result code (Service Unavailable) is made precisely for this kind of issue and is Google’s recommendation in a situation like this (hat tip to John Andrews for teaching me the value of a 503 years ago).

Unfortunately, it appears the Consumerist folks either don’t have an SEO on staff, or don’t have a competent one. Instead of serving up a 503 code while they investigated the hack, each and every single URL on Consumerist.com served up a 200 status code and displayed the same message alerting their readers to what was going on.

[Read more...]

“The trouble with the world is that the stupid are so confident while the intelligent are full of doubt.”
- Bertrand Russell

I’m not sure about the world at large, but that quote by Bertrand Russell pretty much nails the SEO industry.

In an industry governed by an algorithm that reportedly incorporates over 200 factors and has countless PHDs working to improve it, we’re constantly bombarded with people claiming to have discovered the key to the topic du jour. To make matters  worse, there always seems to be a massive number of people willing to believe the claims, no matter how bombastic!

Wild A** Guesses

In the aftermath of Google’s Penguin updates, the blogosphere has been flooded with articles discussing what Google changed, what sites it impacted, and most importantly, how to recover if your site was spanked… all within a week of the update rolling out!

We literally had dozens of articles “educating” readers on how to recover from an update before even a SINGLE site recovered!

[Read more...]

Social media is a powerful tool in the right hands, and your business can do great things with a well executed Facebook or Twitter campaign. But you can harm your business if you’re not careful when executing your social media strategy. There are a couple of quick ways to alienate your social media audience… I don’t suggest any of them.

OMG Spam

First of all, and this is obvious…Spam. People hate being spammed. They also don’t like being reminded to Like or Retweet or Follow with every post. Popular comic artist Matthew Inman of The Oatmeal explains how to get more Facebook Likes – in “colorful” Oatmeal fashion. He has great points! No customer wants to go to a Facebook page and see the brand they were interested in purchasing pleading with people to create a connection. Instead, that business should be already creating something memorable that’s going to make people want to come to their page to talk about it with others who enjoy the brand or service.

This is what your fans look like when you spam them.