Pinterest is a highly visual social networking tool used by people to collect and organise ideas for their different projects and interests. Within it, people create and indeed share their ‘boards’of visual bookmarks or ‘pins’ as they are known. They can use these for a variety of reasons, such as to organise events, save recipes or articles and even plan trips.
Users on Pinterest are able to upload, sort, save and generally manage the images or pins as well as other types of media content, such as video, on their pin boards. In effect, Pinterest acts as a sort of personalised media platform on which the user’s content and also the content of other people may be browsed on the main page. Users are then able to save individual pins to a board of their own using the ‘pin it’ button. The pin-boards was typically be organised around a central theme. Other content found elsewhere on the Internet can also be uploaded to a pin-board by using the ‘pin it’ button which can be installed directly into the bookmarks bar on many web browsers or it can also be added by a webmaster directly onto their own website.
Pinterest has proven to be an especially popular social networking medium among women and according to stats in the USA, women make up around 70% of the current Pinterest audience with users spending around 90 minutes+ per month on the site. Apparently the most popular categories in use on the site are food, drink, DIY and crafts, women’s clothing, home decor, travel and history. If you look at Medieval Recipes on Pinterest it is a good example of a Pinterest user who posts images that appeal to more than one sector. ie. to food lovers and students of medieval history.
the education sector, Pinterest is often be used by teachers to organise their lessons pinning sites that they can later refer to and students even use Pinterest to organise and pin sources as well as collaborate with their friends or fellow students on projects.
- The ways that Pinterest can help with your marketing & SEO profile
Improved chances of showing up in Serps
Any Internet marketer will tell you that one of the prime targets of any SEO activity is to show up in more SERPS – search engine ranking pages. Having a really good Pinterest page and having people pin your images can push your site up the search engine rankings.
More back links to your site
Back links are a very important factor in getting your website ranked on Google and each and every pin is in effect a different link back to your site. There is one caveat in this and that is that links from Pinterest are currently believed to be ‘no follow’ links, so do not effectively pass SEO juice back to your site*. However, even if that is the case, if you have a really interesting Pinterest board then people will be more inclined to click onto your site. (*most social media sites change their functionality on a regular basis so Pinterest could address this no follow issue at some point!)
Pinterest as a search engine
A lot of people don’t think of it as such but Pinterest is a search engine and with a little work invested you have every chance of getting some of your content to the top of the Pinterest searches probably far more easily than you could achieve such rankings on Google.
Fresh content and good social signals
The main search engines such as Google and Bing use social signals in their algorithms for open search rankings. Bing includes pins in its image searches which gives a good opportunity for many small businesses to get highly ranked. Most search engines love to see fresh content in the SERPS so the more relevant, high quality and accordingly highly re-pinned content you have, the more likely Google etc is to revisit your site more often.