Ten great tips to help you optimize your website for Pinterest by John Haydon!

1. TEN W AYS TO O PTIMIZE YOUR W EBSITE FOR P INTEREST
By now you’ve heard about Pinterest, the social site that allows people to share
images and videos, follow boards and people, and re-pin stuff they find interesting.
But have you optimized your website for Pinterest?
Why should you care about Pinterest?
First of all, why should you give an owl’s hoot about Pinterest? There are a few
reasons, including how it’s one of the few social networks where women are the
predominant demographic. Plus, it’s also the fastest growing social networking site
on the planet–ever.
And finally, Pinterest helps you reach your website objectives:
 Getting new visitors
 Getting visitors to stick around longer
 Getting visitors to share your goods with their friends
If you take a look at these these goals, you’ll notice that they all have one thing in
common: Shareable content on your website.
How People Use Pinterest
When Pinterest users visit a website, they have the ability to pin photos or videos
from your website by using abrowser plug-in, saving an image from your website
and uploading it (as shown below), or entering a URL from your website into
Pinterest.

2. After they upload or import an image, they add a short description and select a
board for the pin (shown below). They can add it to a board they’ve created or a
board they’ve been invited to curate pins for.
They can also edit the description and link URL for the pin (shown below). I love doing this with
photos that have the highest virality on my Facebook Page.

3. Repins dominate Pinterest
Keep in mind that people can also repin content from your site once it’s added to a
board. In fact, most of the activity on Pinterest is repinning. What this means for you
is more exposure (more inbound links) to pages on your site that have amazing
images.!
9 Ways to optimized your website for Pinterest
Because people might be visiting your website at this very moment looking for
something to share on Pinterest, it probably makes sense to make sure that your
site actually works! Here are 8 ideas:
1. Test your website. Do this now: copy the URLs of your most visited pages and
copy them into Pinterest by clicking on Add at the top of Pinterest and then into the
URL field you’ll see after you click Add A Pin in the pop-up window. (Note: you need
to have a Pinterest account to do this.)
2. Fix your website. If you’re having problems getting Pinterest to pull in images, talk
to your web master (if you have one of those).
3. If you’re using WordPress, you can use the Open Graph Meta plugin to sniff out the
problems (pulling the right photo from a post or page).

4. 4. Add featured images. Make sure each page or post has a featured image. This is
one of the main image sources Pinterest will use.
5. Use Infographs. Infographics take up much more vertical real estate on Pinterest
than any other type of image, enabling your pin to stand apart from the crowd.
6. Get the Digg Digg plugin. The folks over at Bufferown this plugin, so you can bet
that it’s very reliable. If you don’t use WordPress for your website, check out
the Buffer Button. There’s also the Pinterest plugin I use on this site (mouse over the
images in this post to check it out)
7. Play nicely. Follow the five points of Pinterest etiquette, which are pretty much
common sense.
8. Make sure your content is pin-worthy. Start thinking about how to make your
website content (particularly images and video) remarkable, emotional and
interesting.
9. Add text to images. When someone pins an image from your site, all that’s taken
with them is the image. For some images on your site, it might be a good idea to add
text or a URL to the image (like this one). This way, your branding and/or URL go
along for the ride as people re-pin the image.
10. Verify your website. Help Pinterest users trust your website by verifying it with
Pinterest.
These are a few ideas to make your website ready for Pinterest.
What else would you add?