Your business may look at Pinterest as another social network that you don’t understand or feel the need to waste your time with. And when you don’t know much about the latest social networking craze or what it can do for your business, you won’t give it a second look.
But Pinterest is more than just a virtual corkboard that allows you to post and share images and links to valuable information. It can actually help improve your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts.
So how do you use Pinterest to improve your site’s visibility? Check it out.
Create an active account.
Pinterest is a social network, and the purpose of social networks is to—you guessed it—be social. Make sure that you are actively using Pinterest to follow the right people and pin important items to the right boards. You should also comment on pins made by others or “like” those that really stand out to you as interesting. This will help make people aware of your Pinterest existence and get others to start following you.
Pin regularly.
Once you have built a following, it’s important that you start to pin consistently. Your following will start to notice trends in your pinning, and if they’re truly interested in the items you pin, they’ll start to search your board on a regular basis for new and exciting information. If you have four separate pins that you want to share, make sure that you share them on different days so that you’re constantly creating new content for your following. This keeps you active and keeps them interested.
Link it to your site.
Pinterest can drive traffic to your website or blog, so make sure that you’re linking your pins appropriately. Once you have your following, they will start to become more and more interested in what you share. Make sure that you’re using high quality images to catch their attention and that you’re linking back to the right place. For example, if your pin says “cucumber recipes”, you better lead to a page that contains cucumber recipes, whether it be a page directly on your website or on your blog. When you have these links set up correctly, you will start to drive more traffic to your site, which greatly improves your SEO.
Let people pin for you.
If you have a blog, you probably already have a share button for email, Facebook and Twitter. What you need to add is a “pin it” button so that your web visitors or blog readers can easily pin your content directly to their own boards. This information will then be placed on their dedicated board for their following to see, which will provide you with even more exposure and even more backlinks.
Be descriptive.
The description you put on your pins will make or break if you get clicked on or repinned, so make sure that you’re as descriptive as possible without giving it all away. For example, if you want to lead people to your blog with all your wonderful recipes, don’t put the entire recipe in the description. If you do, nobody will need to click through to get the recipe, and you won’t generate any traffic.
It’s always a good idea to use popular keywords in your description too. Pinterest has a search feature, and if your pins use popular keywords that are being searched, your pin will end up on the results page.
Pin more than content.
Most people use Pinterest to give a snippet of information that leads back to a blog post or other type of static content, but you can get more lively. Instead of heavy text-based articles, lead your followers to videos or infographics that will capture more of their attention.
Pinterest has quickly grown in popularity, and there are plenty of ways that you can use the social network to help improve your website’s SEO efforts. Use these tips, and you’ll soon see a giant increase in traffic and rank.
Jacob Smith is a marketing specialist writing on behalf of SEOMap. Learn more about their work here.
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