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Yes definitely adding the Infographics at the top is the best way. Make sure you syndicate the infographics on various social media profiles as well.

Nice link, Chris.  Thanks! I have found from personal experience that long articles pull in a LOT more long-tail traffic. I have lots of pages on my site that had 50 words several years ago and I have slowly be rewriting them into 1000 to 3000 word articles with lots of photos.  As I do this the traffic skyrockets, not only from increase longtail but also by higher rankings.

Good luck with this George, google places is a tiresome part of Google many have lengthy issues with. Try anything and everything, you can stop when it finally works.

Topsy is really the closest thing I can think of that does this. Although you'd need to put in a keyword, phrase or URL to see results. But they have tons of data from across the web!

Just ideas that seem to work for me.... Design a site that allows you to advertise your most valuable content on all or most pages of your site - like in a sidebar or in "related boxes".... go to a good site like CNN and watch how they do this. Look at  right side of this page with all of the promoted content.  This promotes your content to your current visitors who should be your most important fans. Make it easy for people to share your content with FB buttons or addthis.com widgets If you do the two items above and you do have viral content then just exposing it to a few people will be like throwing gasoline on a fire.  If you have pedestrian content then not much will happen. *  Get an RSS feed that allows people to subscribe.  I use feedburner and have lots of people who get my feed by RSS and email messages.   Whenever I publish something new it goes out to thousands of subscribers and many of them visit my site within just 48 hours.  Enough of these people post to FB, Twitter, etc. that I don't have to do it myself. Keep in mind that it is really really really hard to produce viral content - even if you have done it many times and intentionally try to do it.   When I intentionally try to make viral content it does not work.... then I write a simple article on a topic that I know a lot about and it pulls in more traffic than something viral - but pulls in that traffic over time because it gets good rankings in the organic SERPs and a steady stream of social shares. Most of the content that I produced gets less than viral attention.  A few percent can pull in major traffic - often 100,000 visitors within 48 hours, but that type of content  only happens for me a couple times per year. However, once you have a large library of high quality content  and people are visiting your site regularly the number of visitors from social sites and blogs will grow steadily. This is not viral it is simply the steady  social sharing of good content which for me brings in lots of traffic - far more over time that if everything that I produce would go viral for a short time. So, you don't have to focus on viral to get lots of traffic.  Who would you rather have on your baseball team - a guy who hits a homerun every few games but strikes out a lot or a guy who hits a single almost every time at bat? SEOs overvalue viral and undervalue steady.  It is like the tortoise and the hare.

Hi Linda, I will definitely stop by your forum to read up on this. Sounds quite complicated, indeed. Thanks for the heads up!

If Phil does not have what you're looking for I don't think anyone does. All the best, Thomas

Another question i forgot to ask - if you're implementing a social media share widget (such as: http://sharethis.com/publishers/get-sharing-tools) which included: facebook, twitter, google plus, etc Do you have to still create and add Open Graph Protocols e.g. og:url, og:url, og:image ? Thanks, Matt

If your looking for a ways of getting your content out you can find some good ideas here - http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/how-to-push-an-infographic (i wrote it so slightly biased) but It really depends on what the content is and how good it is - try paying for some stumbles its a good way to see how people like it

Hi Matt, Oh dear, this is a problem I have seen reported several times, and the feedback from Google about it is kind of ridiculous. Here's an example of Googler Vanessa Gene's response to an issue like yours: We're pulling that photo in from your website's homepage. If you'd like it removed from the Maps listings, the easiest way to do it is by removing the photo from your site. http://support.google.com/places/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=142916_On your business's Place Page, you may see photos from other sources as well, including pictures from the web and from Google users. _- Vanessa (source: http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!searchin/business/pulling$20photo/business/eQTOtQOEG8w/StgwtDj6dowJ) It does appear that the image being displayed on the SERPs side of your result is coming from a blog post about sailing on the website, here, http://www.audiparramatta.com.au/au_partner/p_au_21540/en_home/experience/sailing_sport/sailing_news/2010_victoria_week.detail.2010~01~olympic_sailor_winner.html I find it rather silly that Google's solution is to remove the image from your website, thus diminishing your website's content quality. Honestly, I want to blog about this because I think it's such an odd scenario, with Google pulling totally random images for businesses. They could be of anything! What I do see is that it appears you haven't made the effort to upload any of your own photos to the Google+ Local pages. Perhaps there is a chance that if you do so, you might eventually see the current image replaced by one of your choosing. However, be advised that it is still taken weeks for images you upload to appear live in many cases. I've seen reports of 4-6 weeks. So, this isn't an issue you can fix quickly, if you can fix it at all. Sorry not to have an easy solution, but I hope you feel brought up to speed on this, in regards to the being a phenomenon affecting numerous businesses.

Thanks Miriam, That helps alot. Thanks, Matt

This is the approach that I am using.  I spend all of my time creating content. It is a really really slow way to start but every bit of content that you get up starts to pull in a little traffic and after you have done that for a while it starts to build momentum. I would focus on the following types of content... -- misconceptions (these surprise people and can get shared) -- basic knowledge explained exceptionally well (if you can do this in best-on-the-web quality it can get shared widely - but slowly) -- things that everyone should know but most people don't know (how to select mountain bike tires for sand vs mud vs gravel vs pavement) -- demonstrations (how to change a mountain bike tire in 50 seconds) -- stuff that pisses people off  (how to prevent flats... focusing on rim strips, spoke ends, tire selection, tire inspection, inflation, what to avoid hitting) -- stuff that surprises...  (the number of calories required to finish an ultradistance triathlon and the amount that must be consumed on the road to keep from bonking...  on top of that there is the liquid requirement - which varies by race day air temp - very different approaches for 50 degree race day in Montreal and a 90 degree race day in Florida) It is really rare to have something go viral.  I shoot for things that are simply good content that people will share if they like it.