Tips for optimizing your Site for the Pin it Button

So, you have a blog or a website and you’ve taken that extra step of installing a Pin it button to make it easy for your readers to share your glorious images on Pinterest. Your savvy readers also have the bookmarklet installed on their browser, but is your site really ready for Pinterest?

The Pin it Button

There are several options for pin it buttons depending  if you have a stand alone website, are using Blogger or using WordPress. There are third party plugins and Pinterest even offers code to use. (Click here for Pinterest’s code)

I use a simple WordPress plugin called Pinterest Pin It Button. It allows you to select a specific image from each post to be the pin and to add a description up to 500 characters long. Before I publish each blog post, I select an image to be used and I add a description.

If you’re on Blogger, here’s a Pint it button tutorial from BloggerSentral.com

What to include in a pin description:

If the Pin it button you choose allows you add a description, here are a few things to keep in mind:

• You can use the title of blog post or article
• Short description if not apparent from title
• Name of blog or website
• If it is a product you can also include the name of the product and the price
• # (hashtags) are searchable on Pinterest – or they soon will be. Get the latest.

For example, the picture used in the image above could be from a craft supply site. If the owner added the description it could read ‘Quilling Tutorial| Multi-colored strands of quilling paper from XYZcraftsupplyco.com ready to be made into a work of art. $3.99“. This gives the blog post title, describes what is in the image and also provides a clickable link of where it can be purchased.

Including the cost of the paper in the description will put the pin in the ‘gifts’ category of Pinterest as well as in whatever category the board is in that it is pinned to. This means more opportunities for it to be found on Pinterest.

Using key words in the description is very important for Search Engine Optimization (SEO). With a quick Google image search for quilling paper, I was able to find several links to Pinterest pins that had quilling in the description.

If a description is not entered and left up to the pinner, they could use a description like ‘pretty’ or ‘colorful’ which would not be very helpful for other others searching for similar topics or products.

The Pin it Bookmarklet

The Pin it Bookmarklet for for web browsers like Chrome, Safari or Internet Explorer allows pinners to pick any image on the page to use as a pin.  The bookmarklet is also available for iOS devices like iPhone and iPad. (Click here for a video tutorial)

When an image is pinned the bookmarklet, the description is what ever the picture has been named when it was uploaded to the site. There have been several times when pinning from a site that the pin description reads something like this: DSC_34251 or 1268_n.jpg. When that happens, I type in my own pin description.  My description may or may not be the message that the publisher is trying to convey.

Here’s an example from a very popular website:

The description appears to be the name the camera assigned. This is not helpful for the site owner at all. To optimize this image for Pinterest and for SEO, it should have been renamed when it was uploaded to the site.

Here are a few things to think about when naming pictures:

• Use keywords that people will use to find your blog post or product
• Use hyphens between each keyword for example the main image in this post is called Optimize-your-site-for-pin-it-button
• Keep the name relevant to the image and the article

Sure, the pinner always has the option to change the description no matter which method they use to pin but, if they a good description to start with, they might just leave it as is.

If you have any questions or comments please feel free to leave them below, feedback is always welcome.