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March 12, 2014

It’s Time to Optimize for Pinterest

Pinterest is the third most popular social network and the 16th most visited website in the U.S. It’s one of the largest traffic sources in the world behind Google and Facebook and chances are you may be one of the 85 million unique visitors Pinterest sees each month. Whether you’re a casual personal Pinner, a full blown Pin-aholic (ME!) or even a business, it’s time to get to optimizing.

Profile
Start the optimization process by choosing the right username (this appears in your Pinterest URL). Seems easy enough, but there are character limits and the possibility that out of the 70 million Pinterest users someone else might have already claimed the username you were hoping to score. Whether you’re battling coming up with another variation of your brand/desired username or just starting out the casual Pinner process, take these items into consideration:
  • Just like your website URL, start with your most important keyword
  • After that you may want to incorporate a unique identifier, but be sure it’s easy to remember and also easy to spell
  • Your profile name is different from your username — it is how you are identified to other Pinners in your Pin feed and search results — but the same considerations apply

Now that you have an awesome username and profile name it’s time to get down to business with your About Me section. You have 200 characters to tell the Pinterest-sphere who you are and these 200 characters need to include keywords that other users may search for to find you. You also have the opportunity to add your location to your profile, which is important if local traffic is a factor.

By all means, please verify your website! Verifying your website tells the Pinterest world you have a website, and that you’re too legit to quit. It also helps boost your profile in search results. Do you have a Facebook and/or Twitter account? I bet you do. Connect them to your Pinterest account! This allows you to cross-promote across all of your social channels so that users who are already fans on Facebook and/or Twitter can follow you on Pinterest too. Plus, while we’re on the topic of optimization, having a strong social presence connected to your website tells Google that you’re an information source to be trusted (more trust means more visibility).

Boards
Put an end to boring and generic board names! Use a keyword in your board name and please, please, please fill in your board descriptions, which have 300 more available characters than your profile description! That’s 300 more characters to optimize with relevant keywords that will help your current and future followers find you in a search. And don’t forget to categorize those boards so that your pins will show up on Pinterest’s larger category pages.

Pins
When Pinning from Pinterest, you have the authority to change the description once you Pin the image to one of you boards. This is one of (or maybe the only) moral way to steal other people’s images and repackage them as your own – and that’s because you’re not stealing, you’re curating. So when you curate other users’ images and pin them to a well-named board (with an optimized description and relevant category) be sure to update the description and if possible, include a relevant keyword. Then there is Pinning from a website. If it’s your own website, be sure that you include the full link to the page you’re pinning from (hello, referral traffic!) and a keyword rich description.

Happy Pinning!