4 Pinterest Tips to Make Your Pins More Searchable on Pinterest

Pinterest is amazing, I can honestly spend hours at a time looking at different infographics, advertising boards, and pins. Now with more than 48 million users of the social media, it’s a great social media marketing tool. But with 48 million users pinning dozens of pins and massively more pins, trying to get your pins to show up on search results are much harder.

Old school tactics such as constantly pinning again and again for a category used to help drive traffic. This was because if you kept spamming your pins, your pins would show up on top more often. However, Pinterest has caught on, and they’ve changed the algorithm to help prevent such activities under the new changes made in mid March by Pinterest.

Now that they’ve been very good at stopping most spammers, and decreasing the traffic of marketers that were using that technique, learning to search optimize your pins for keywords on Pinterest’s search engine will be very vital. This specific posts only discuss about optimizing your pins. I will write another article about optimizing your boards, and your user profile in the future.

Optimizing your pins will be more important, since this is the default search setting for Pinterest.Here are four ways to make your pins more searchable on Pinterest.

Search Optimization for Pins on Pinterest

1)Keywords Should be in the Description of Pins

Please don’t be mistaken, I’m not talking about search optimization for Google or Bing, this is just for Pinterest’s search engine when looking for pins with the keyword.

The first thing you need to do to optimize your pins for search is to ensure that you put keywords into your pin’s descriptions. For example, let’s say you want to create pins that are more locally targeted, then you may put in keyword, “Fashion trends in L.A., or fashion trends in New York.”

This is important for localized businesses to ensure that they put their city in pin’s descriptions. The huge majority of pins that were searched based on a keyword, I believe, are found using this particular method.

What really bugged me was that some of the pins that were searched by keywords never even had one single keyword in the actual description itself, yet it was showing up, this is when I clicked on them and was able to determine that the second factor also played a role in which pins showed up in search feeds.

2)The Pin Should Come From a Domain with the Keyword In It

What I also noticed when searching for pins was there was a good chunk of pins that didn’t have any of the keywords that I was searching for but still popped up in the searches. For example, when I typed in Pinterest infographic, I would sometimes get social media marketing in the description. Though the number of pins that did show up without the keywords in the description were much lower than those that did.

I know for a fact that Pinterest can’t read text on pictures, so I decided to click on where the pictures were hosted. And what I noticed was that the many of the pictures that didn’t have the keywords in the descriptions had keywords in the domains that they were from.

When I clicked on it the pin that had social media marketing as the description, it led to a site that had the key words “Pinterest Infographic” in the domain such as. www.examplesite.com/social-media/five-pinterest-infographics-for-CEOS

My speculation is that Pinterest scrapes the domain, or the webpage and takes that into consideration into it’s search algorithm.

3)Keywords Should be in the Name of the Picture/Photo File

What also helped, but I couldn’t find as a strong correlation, was the name of the file contained keywords as well. Based on closer inspection I believe why it helps is because some people will pin the actual domain where the file is hosted.

For example if the name of your infographic or pin is whateveryouwant.jpg and it’s hosted on the site www.examplesite.com/uploads/whateveryouwant.jpg then Pinterest probably won’t pay too much attention to it. However, if you if the file name is pinterest-infographic.jpg and your pin is directly taken from www.examplesite.com/uploads/pinterest-infographic.jpg then this will help in the search results of the actual Pinterest search feed.

This is really just an extension of the second point that was made.

4)The Number of Repins Matter

I typed in a bunch of random keywords and noticed that many of the pins that showed up for heavy used keywords such as, red velvet cupcake and cotton candy was quite interesting. It was hard to find pins that showed up on search that had not been repinned at least once.

This wasn’t the case for keywords that aren’t searched as often but it seemed to be the case for popular key words.

I did one for my own branded keyword, (MCNG Marketing) and the one with the most repins that contained the keyword in the description showed up first, but then I tried it for the word cotton candy, and it wasn’t the one with the most repins that was first, but it still did have repins.

5) What about Alt Tags and Titles of the Pins?

Based on my research and clicking on dozens of pins, it didn’t seem that the alt, or the title played a dominant role in showing up in the search results, but this would need more research and bigger sample size. I would imagine this isn’t of much interest because Pinterest isn’t interested in being a search engine like Google or Bing.

I still highly encourage you to properly label these pictures with a correct and detailed tag for your images. The reason for this is because when someone does use Pinterest’s official pin bookmarklet then the description automatically becomes what the alt tag is, however if you use a pin it button like the one I have on my site that’s from Addthis, they take the title tag from that particular page or blog post.

And it’s good for SEO on the Google and Bing search engines. This is why it’s important to ensure that you have an integrated optimization strategy.

Keep in mind that this is all speculation based on observation. It would be interesting to see what other marketers and search engine optimizers think. I highly encourage you to do your own tests and see if you notice any patterns.

If you do or if you think what I’m saying is a bunch of poppycock, please leave a comment. I would love to hear what you have to say.

Continue reading here: How Businesses Can Use Guided Search On Pinterest

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