HowDoIMarketMyBiz.com

If you keep hearing about Pinterest and want to hop on the bandwagon because you heard about the SEO benefits, it’s time to hop off. Pinterest is a social community, not an SEO tool.

With every social community, (the most popular being Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn), in order to have your business succeed on a social network, you’ve got to be present, active and participate. This is where most businesses fail using social media. They think they can just open up an account and the business comes pouring in. Not so.

There’s no denying that Pinterest does have some SEO power because it can drive traffic to your site. Visits to your web site is just one of MANY elements of SEO, but, recent studies are showing that the bounce rate is high. So, people click to your site and click right off in a matter of seconds. You can’t make a direct sale that way.

Pinterest’s REAL power is building a visual representation of your brand. See Better Homes and Gardens on Pinterest as an example of a brand who’s doing it right. Choose good images to pin that are relevant to your business and whenever you see a box to fill in, always customize with your keywords and link people back to your blog (this is where the SEO part comes in). You should always write a pin description (it appears under the pin image and provides additional information about your blog post).

Make sure the image makes sense on its own, as some images only make sense in the context of the blog article. You may need to overlay some text onto the image for major impact.

As you are getting started in Pinterest, find followers who are genuinely interested in your site and build targeted connections for link building (that means, make friends online and then talk about how they can link to your website – Twitter is also great for this.) This is where the real SEO benefits begin.

Share and Enjoy!

•