Optimize Your Images for Pinterest Pin It Buttons

We know that Pinterest is great for traffic generation. More and more I’m hearing that it is becoming one of the top sources of traffic generation for many bloggers and online business owners. Getting traffic from Pinterest goes beyond having images from your site pinned to Pinterest.

In this weeks’ podcast episode, Marketing Strategy and the Utility of Pinterest, Vincent Ng and I discussed Pinterest co-founder Evan Sharp’s explanation of Pinterest. He describes it as ” a visual discovery tool.” Another way to say that is that Pinterest is a search tool.

Currently, one of the ways that search tools like Pinterest and Google function is by providing results based on text searches. Though probably not too far off in the future, technology hasn’t quite yet advanced to bring us search results based on image recognition. So even though Pinterest is a visually based tool, text still plays a vital role.

Pin it button options

To increase the chances that we get traffic from Pinterest it s good idea to have keyword optimized pin descriptions for images pinned from your site. People visiting your site have several choices of how to Pin images from your site to Pinterest. There are social sharing tools that can be used with different browsers and several that can be a part of the website such as the pin it button I use here. Each day there seems to be a new pin it button to choose from and they each seem to work a little differently in the way that they assign pin descriptions.

Pinterest offers a bookmarklet tool that can be installed into almost any internet browser that makes pinning very easy. Google Chrome has taken it a step further, it now automatically displays a white Pin it button as you mouse over an image on any website you visit if you have the bookmarklet installed and if you right click on an image you’ll also see a pin it option in the menu that appears.

Optimizing your images for Pinterest

Optimizing your images for Pinterest goes beyond having an attractive image. Images that include keyword rich pin descriptions can help your content to be found on Pinterest as well as on search engines such as Google.  Simple adjustments can be made on your blog or website to help your pins be found and drive even more traffic back to your site no matter which Pin it option visitors use.

As far as which one to use on your site, I prefer ones that allow you to customize the text used. The one I use allows me to write a custom pin description for the Pin it button in the social share bar at the top of each post.

Below is a video that explains this a bit further on a WordPress site but the basic principles should apply even if you’re not a WordPress user.

While it’s still possible for visitors to your site to change the pin description, I find that most leave it as is if it’s relevant to the image and not spammy. Try to keep it less than 200 characters and use the keywords in a natural tone.

For example the pin description for the featured image at the beginning of this post I chose to use the title of this post, “Optimize Your Images for Pinterest Pin it Buttons.” Depending on which pin it button is used it could also be  “Optimize Your Images for Pinterest Pin it Buttons #OhSoPinteresting.” (Click here for more about hashtags (#) on Pinterest) Both have the keywords I want this post to be found for.

Whats your favorite Pin it button to use? Let me know in the comments below. Thanks 🙂