9 Ways to Optimize Your Website for Pinterest

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. And you’ve probably read a few articles about how to use Pinterest to promote your cause, raise money, and find new audiences.

But have you prepared your organization’s website for interest?

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. It’s also the fastest growing social networking site on the planet–ever.

There’s a massive party over at Pinterest. Are you invited?

Meanwhile, at your website…

Pinned by Laura

At first glance, it might seem that there’s no relationship between the Pinterest party and the snoozefest on your website. After all the goals you have for your website are really not about Pinterest, which makes sense because, well… Pinterest is not your website. 🙂

You have goals like:

• 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 to Share Content on a Website

When Pinterest users visit a website, they have the ability to pin photos or videos on your website by using a browser plug-in, saving an image on your website and uploading it into Pinterest, or entering a URL from your website into Pinterest (as shown below).

 

When someone enters a URL from your website into Pinterest, they will be able to scroll through the various different images on your site, and then select the juiciest one to share on Pinterest!

Is your website-optimized 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. First, test your website with Pinterest. 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. 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. Make sure each page or post has a featured image. This is the image Pinterest will pull in. WordPress users can do this easily.
5. Chop up Infographs. Infographics as you know are sometimes very, very tall images. Pinterest doesn’t play nicely with infographs. Make sure yours are chopped up into stand-alone sections.
6. Get the Digg Digg plugin like the one I have at my blog. The folks over at Buffer own 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.
7. 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. This way, your branding and/or URL go along for the ride as people re-pin the image.

These are a few ideas to make your website ready for Pinterest.

What else would you add?