Use Pinterest to Improve your Image and Website SEO

When you have an online presence and a business website that is meant to accommodate users, then there are many reasons for optimizing images. Images that you use anywhere in your content will enhance the website’s SEO score, make your articles more search engine friendly and will improve the site’s loading time.

Image optimization is often an overlooked aspect of search engine optimization, but has several benefits:

• Images used will show up in search results and with a lower competition threshold, you could easily see your image rank higher with some optimization techniques.
• A well designed image will improve your page’s bounce rate and positively impact the SEO of the site.
• By creating custom images, you can get yourself some links from other websites/blogs that might use the image or share it on social platforms.
• Photo and image sharing social platform Pinterest is great source of traffic to draw from.

Pinterest as a Search Engine

The first thing you need to know is that Pinterest is a search engine. People are on Pinterest to search and find things that interest them, or they need help with.

So, just like Google, Pinterest needs to have as much information as possible about your image to show it in search results. When you work with images or photos, Pinterest is the place to share yours. Pinterest is the most popular social network to share images from around the web.

Since Pinterest is a visual search engine, it’s important to follow to some visual best practices. This is why you need two things for both Pinterest and search engines — images and text content.

Start with a Great Image

It’s important to have an interesting image — by design or its content — but it has to grab the attention of the viewer. After all, if you don’t have an image that captures people as they scroll through the feed, the results will be less impactful.

One of the key aspects of an image to be posted on Pinterest is that tall images have a higher success rate. If your image is taller than it is wide, you’re off to a great start. The ideal size often recommended is 735px by 1100px, but it isn’t strictly imposed.

Image Description

When you share an image on Pinterest, it’s always better to use the available text fields to add a description. This way the Pinterest algorithm is able to quickly categorize your image and serve it to the best-suited audience.

Here are a handful of tips to make sure you’re crafting the best possible descriptions that help your images show in search:

• Be Descriptive: You want to make sure you describe both what the pinned image is and what the full article entails.
• Keywords are Essential: Use keywords from the article that might be of interest to people, in the description.
• Use Hashtags: Hashtags have become a popular trick to categorize information on the internet. Use 3–5 hashtags in your pin descriptions to help Pinterest identify the interest categories your image fits into.
• Omit URLs in the Description: Just like Google doesn’t want spam content filling up the search results page, and has ways of detecting it, Pinterest does too. Don’t insert the URL in the pin description, because it will already be attached to the pinned image itself.

Since Pinterest is an authority website, the images shared on the network are more likely to get indexed and ranked in results of general purpose search engines like Google. It creates a positive feedback loop for your images and website.