How to Optimize Your Food Blog for Pinterest Part 1 – Pin It Button Everywhere

Are you a Pinterest person?

I have been on Pinterest for so long that I forget, not everyone likes everything. Some people just aren’t on Pinterest. When I look over to the left to see recommendations, it’s funny to me how many of my friends pop up to invite.

Oh well. Their loss.

Personally, I love it. It is the best bookmarking tool for me. Lots of great pictures to give me ideas for…

Just about everything.

Lots and lots of Easter stuff to pin. Got a great idea for how to make lots of different colors of Easter eggs this year just by using food coloring I already had. Check out this pin the McCormick’s.

Got tons of ideas for projects at my son’s school. It’s a great way to collaborate with the other parents on some of the projects, too. We can all pin to a group board and even keep it secret, if we want. And that way we don’t clog up each others email going back and forth with ideas and pictures.

But my favorite thing to use it for is recipe and recipe image collection. Whether it’s the Best Gluten Free Recipes, Recipe Inspiration or Photography Inspiration, it is just plain awesome to me.

 

Follow Tia’s Kitchen Recipes’s board Best Gluten-Free Recipes on Pinterest.
 
Follow Tia’s Kitchen Recipes’s board Photography Inspiration on Pinterest. 

I’m not alone, though. As of January 2015, Pinterest has over 70 million users. Now, if you have a blog, especially a food blog, Pinterest is a great place to attract readers.

But that 70 million users number is not the only reason to use Pinterest if you have a blog. Especially a food blog.

Food and Drink is one of the most pinned and browsed categories.

Pins and Pinterest Boards now show up in Google rankings for web search and image search. (Although I must complain about when a Google image search gives me a board. I click on the board to find the image I was looking for. I click on the image in Pinterest. And somehow I get taken back to the Google image search. ??? How and why are people pinning Google image searches? Another post for another Monday.)

And, a lot of food blogs, including Tia’s Kitchen, get just as much traffic from Pinterest as they do from Google Search. Seriously!

So, now that you have some reasons to use Pinterest if you have a food blog, let me give you some hows. As in how to use Pinterest for you food blog. Or How to Optimize Your Food Blog for Pinterest. This is the first of 3 parts because it would just be way too much in one post.

If you are a Pinterest person, have you ever gone to your favorite blog, seen a great recipe (or something else you want to pin for later) and gone to pin it. Only to realize there is no easy way to pin it.

You could always have the “Pin It” button in your top toolbar, but I always forget it’s even there. So many sites make it so easy to pin an image that when your readers come to your site, and it isn’t easy, they usually give up.

And it’s such a shame because it is so easy to install a plugin to make it super easy for your readers to pin any image. And, in turn, it encourages them to pin an image. Leading to others finding your image on Pinterest. And then finding you and your blog. Win-win!

You need to have the Pin It button everywhere. in the next 2 parts to this series, we will go over some of my favorite WordPress Plugins for having those Pin It buttons on your blog. But before we go, one thing you can do right now to help your Pinterest future. Fill in the descriptions for your images in your blog posts. If you don’t even if someone pins your image using the Pin It button in their toolbar, the description will be blank. And they can and will fill in whatever they want or need to be able to pin it. Sometimes it’s just a period so Pinterest will take it. Or who knows?!

But if you have the descriptions and Alt Text filled in with what you want, your reader will most likely just pick the board and click Pin It. And in WordPress, it’s super easy. When you click Add Media in your post to add an image, on the right side under URL, Title and Caption, you will see Alt Text and Description. Just fill in both of these with the same thing, and you are covered.

“What should you put in there?” you say.

Well, a keyword rich description, of course. What would entice you to click if you saw that image in your Pinterest feed?

And, it’s is good to include the link to your blog or the post itself at the end. Lots of pins get hijacked by spammers who usually don’t bother to change the description. Just the link. So if your pin gets hijacked with a different click through link and someone wants to get to your blog post/recipe, they can.

Next week – 

How to Optimize Your Website for Pinterest Part 2 – Pin It Hover Button

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Hey! Pin with me on Pinterest. – Tia’s Kitchen

*This post is part of Media Musings Monday.*