Thoughts on Pinterest as an SEO tool to drive traffic and improve page rank
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Right now, Pinterest is the hottest social media site on the Web. Pinterest’s exponential growth in both traffic volume and user engagement indicates that it’s more than just the flavor of the moment—it’s here to stay. Hitwise reported that Pinterest traffic increased 36 percent (to 103 million visitors) from January 12 to February 12; Pinterest drove more traffic to publishers in February than Twitter. And according to comScore, Pinterest users spent an average of 89 minutes on the site in January 2012 compared to 21 minutes on Twitter, 17 minutes on LinkedIn and only 3 minutes on Google+. source:http://blog.performics. |
This is how people use Pinterest according to Pinterest
| Pinterest lets you organize and share all the beautiful things you find on the web. People use pinboards to plan their weddings, decorate their homes, and organize their favorite recipes.Idea: Pinterest pinboards could be arranged into sections eg sights in a certain city, Honeymoon Locations, Adventure activitiesPeople can leave comments about what you pin. eg someone plans a holiday and has pictures of places to visit and hotels to stay and other people can leave their comments about their experience at these places etcPinterest is currently invite-only. You can request an invite from us or you can be invited by someone who is already a part of Pinterest.When you receive an invite, you can register via Facebook Connect or connect through Twitter.This page has all the instructions for how to use it http://pinterest.com/about/ |
SEO And Social Media Opportunities
Pinterest links were “Do Follow” but went “No Follow” in March 2012
Pinterest did have follow root domain links in the description but these have also been removed.
It’s benefits will probably be dependent on what niche you are in and if traffic from Pinterest stays on your website and therefore helps to improve page rank.
You can create a custom user name for your account. User name can only be 15 characters long. So you would need to decide if you want it to be your Brand or a Keyword
For each topic you create a board (that can have as many pins as you like on a board). This board can be named and boards can be searched for in Pinterest and Google
People can follow every board of a certain user or they can just follow one board. If they follow all boards they will automatically follow every new board created.
Pinterest gives instructions to remove the account from google searchs. Which means it automatically is added.
People can go directly to your website and pin images from there
2 kinds of Pinterest button for websites – http://pinterest.com/about/
1. For the side bar – They click the icon and go to your pinterest account where they can then repin things.
2. For Blog Posts and Pages – Embed the pinit button so they can pin directly from the website, just like they would share a post on facebook or twitter
Pinterest images are starting to show in google searches not as images but as a normal search term http://www.creativeramblings.
So the name of the pinboard will be very important as it forms part of the url as you can see in this example http://pinterest.com/
In addition,
| Pinterest has developed its own categories to help further define the available content on its site. Under the category “Everything” at the top of the home page, there are 31 categories to help visitors start browsing Pinterest content. These category names, including “Architecture,” “Education,” “Pets” and so on, are written as plain HREF hyperlinks that search engines can easily follow. This provides additional context (and defining keywords) for category pages and individual pin pages.source : http://blog.performics.com/search/2012/04/pinterest-seo-capabilities-and-organic-search-strategies-.htmlEach pin added using the Pin It button links back to the site it came from, you can also add a description and tags, you can also share with facebook and or twitter. You can upload from your computer.When someone else repins your photo – Repins maintain the source-link of the image no matter how many times it’s repinned. But people can change the description.You can mention a pin to a Pinterest user, you first need to be following at least one board belonging to him/her.Other people can pin to your board if you enable thisLiking a pin adds the image to your profile’s Likes section; the image does not get added to one of your boards.source: http://pinterest.com |
Summary
- Pinterest is used like a social media tool by the users and the direct SEO benefits it once had have now been removed. However in google it acts more like a blog and therefore is very different to facebook and twitter. It is both social media and organic search.
- With regards to SEO the account name works like a blog category and the pinboards are like blog post url’s. Pinboards rank in google as a page, giving us another opportunity to be found for our keywords in a similar way to YouTube or google images. However this is likely only to work for long tail keywords with low search volume unless the page has lots of long comments, which may give it good content.
- SEO
Structure/setup of the account would be just as important as with a blog and also adding the images with the descriptions and SEO tags would be of similar importance to a blog. - Social Media
Activities such as liking other people’s pins following other people and suggesting boards/images to them that they may want on their board, would be important in order to build the importance and therefore rank of the Pinterest board as a page in google, as well as build brand awareness etc - Need to consider that in order to add photos with links back to your site we will also need to be adding more photos to your website all the time.
More Pinterest Information
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According to comScore, the typical Pinterest user is a 25+ year-old woman with kids and a household income of over $100K:
Pinterest is an ideal platform for users to (1) participate with your brand and (2) evangelize that participation to users with similar interests. On Pinterest, a user discovers your product, participates with your brand by saying they like that product (pinning it) and then shares that participation through the pin. For instance, when a user pins your product to her board, she’s saying to her followers, “look at this cool thing I found.” And unlike Twitter and Facebook, Pinterest following is based on interests, not friends. The follower that sees the user’s new pin thus has similar interests and is likely to also be interested in the pinned product. Pinterest users can follow in three different ways—follow a person, a pin or an entire board. When a person follows an entire board, the reach or influence that board has is significant; the follower is saying they trust the board creator’s sense of style or choice of content. This exposes the follower to brands and content that she otherwise wouldn’t have seen or engaged with. Additionally, on Pinterest, users can log in with their Twitter or Facebook accounts. Thus, any action on Pinterest—pinning, commenting, re-pinning—can be shared across social networks outside of Pinterest. For instance, a Pinterest user’s Facebook friend could see that the user pinned something of interest. Search engines are always focused on incorporating more social results within the search engine results pages (SERPs). Brands can occupy more valuable organic SERP real estate by creating profiles on popular social media sites like Pinterest. To illustrate, Nordstrom’s Pinterest page ranked #9 in a March 2012 Google search for “Nordstrom’s.” Nordstom’s Pinterest page actually ranked above Nordstorm’s Twitter page, illustrating that Google’s algorithm thinks highly of Pinterest. Reserve Your Name: If you don’t reserve your brand’s name on Pinterest, someone else will! Implement the “Pin It” Button on Your Site: Make pinning easy by putting the “Pin It” button on all product pages, images and videos. Encourage pinning through on- and off-site marketing efforts. Drive Pins In-Store: Encourage users to take in-store photos and upload them for pinning (and include store location tags). Add “Pin This” tags/barcodes to physical products (for instance, start with products in window displays to encourage passerby’s to pin). If an in-store product is pinned and a follower sees that the product is available at a certain store location, that follower could visit your store to buy. Pinterest is Crawler-FriendlyPinterest has done some work to make sure that all of the pages on their site can be reached by search engine robots. As of April 2012, Google reports indexing 37 million pages on Pinterest, and Bing reports indexing 4.7 million pages. It is likely that Pinterest keeps its site’s XML sitemap files frequently updated so that the search engines know where to find the latest-updated content. Pinterest SEO Capabilities and Organic Search StrategiesPinterest pages themselves have not yet achieved visibility for high-volume terms outside of brand names. This may change in the future, but for now, according to Hitwise, Pinterest’s own organic search traffic comes from brand terms like “Pinterest,” “Pinterest Website,” “Pinterest login” and so on. Pinterest (so far) is not getting visibility for its high-volume category names or for keyword terms associated with traffic. For example, even though Pinterest has an “Architecture” category, the site is not receiving a high volume of traffic for “Architecture.” Interior pin pages on the Pinterest site do have organic visibility for very, very specific long-tail terms. As just a few illustrative examples, Pinterest.com shows up in search engine ranks for searches like SEWING TUTORIALS RECYCLED BLUE JEANS Pinterest’s low visibility for non-brand terms means that you should not consider Pinterest as a site that will help you build natural search visibility for high-volume keyword terms. More likely than not, a strategy like that wouldn’t work because Pinterest’s content is centered around images, and not text. http://blog.performics. |
A point to note is that if the pinboard had lots of comments it may be seen as content and therefore rank as a page
Pinterest Policies – key points
source: http://pinterest.com
Credit Your SourcesPins are the most useful when they have links back to the original source. If you notice that a pin is not sourced correctly, leave a comment so the original pinner can update the source. Finding the original source is always preferable to a secondary source such as Image Search or a blog entry. Your contentPinterest allows you to pin and post content on the Service, including photos, comments, and other materials. Anything that you pin, post, display, or otherwise make available on our Service, including all Intellectual Property Rights (defined below) in such content, is referred to as “User Content.” You retain all of your rights in all of the User Content you post to our Service. How Pinterest and other users can use your content.Subject to any applicable account settings you select, you grant us a non-exclusive, royalty-free, transferable, sublicensable, worldwide license to use, display, reproduce, re-pin, modify (e.g., re-format), re-arrange, and distribute your User Content on Pinterest for the purposes of operating and providing the Service(s) to you and to our other Users. How long we keep your content:Following termination or deactivation of your account, or if you remove any User Content from your account or your boards, Pinterest may retain your User Content for a commercially reasonable period of time for backup, archival, or audit purposes. Furthermore, Pinterest and other Users may retain and continue to display, reproduce, re-pin, modify, re-arrange, and distribute any of your User Content that other Users have re-pinned to their own boards or which you have posted to public or semi-public areas of the Service. If you open an account on behalf of a company, organization, or other entity, then (a) “you” includes you and that entity, and (b) you represent and warrant that you are an authorized representative of the entity with the authority to bind the entity to these Terms, and that you agree to these Terms on the entity’s behalf. By connecting to Pinterest with a third-party service (e.g., Facebook or Twitter), you give us permission to access and use your information from that service as permitted by that service, and to store your log-in credentials for that service. For more information on the types of information we collect from these third-party services, please read our Privacy Policy |
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