What are the long term benefits of using Pinterest for SEO?

If you own a website or blog, you know how important website traffic is as well as making use of social media marketing. The important aspect of social media is using those communities that are seeing a lot of traffic and growth so that you can gain more exposure. Pinterest is a different kind of social media site that is seeing huge gains in traffic every single month. In fact, there are several SEO Benefits of Using Pinterest to help drive traffic and increase your income.

What is so fascinating about Pinterest is it is so new and has managed to make such a huge impact in a short amount of time. It was not launched live until March of 2010 by founder Ben Silbermann. He worked hard in the early days to get the word out about the site and the unique ‘pinboard’ which allows the use of images, recipes, and more to be shared with others and each board can have its own ‘theme’. These images can be re-pinned and ‘liked’ and then shared on other’s pinboards.

Tips concerning using Pinterest to help your business are abundant but often they are too confusing to be helpful, so this is an attempt to make it simpler to get the most out of this fast growing site. By the first part of 2012, Pinterest was the fastest growing site and it was actually the first to ever reach 11.7 million unique visitors.

Currently the Alexa ranks the site as number 38, which is an insane amount of growth that this site has seen in such as short amount of time, but it is also encouraging to other website owners. In addition, it is a perfect opportunity for you as a business, to take advantage of its popularity. It’s important to understand that many that use Pinterest do not partake in the other social media site such as Facebook and Twiter.

What are the Benefits to Using Pinterest for SEO?

Pinterest offers Do-Follow links, which basically means when Google crawls Pinterest to index it, your links tell the search engine to follow your links, and it boosts your rating. There is also No-Follow link, which means that Google would simply ignore your links, but this is not the case on Pinterest, which is to your benefit.

The first step is getting your account setup and your pinboards – you can have more than one and each can have a different theme. Now, this is important as the site has a lot of women users and therefore, some of items or pinboard just wouldn’t work too well. For instance, setting up a pinboard of heavy machinery probably isn’t going to get a lot of attention. Skim through some of the top pinboards to get an idea of what others are doing.

Use original photos where possible as these are more likely to be shared than stock photos – people enjoy ‘real’ photos especialy on Pinterest. Use the ‘re-pin’ option for greater exposure, this is a feature that many people are using as this is showing some good SEO results.

Other SEO Benefits of Using Pinterest include using the buttons that Pinterest allows you use for getting to websites – use badges as well. Make good use of the ‘Follow Me’ option, which is not quite like Twitter. In addition, at the top of each Pinterest page it can be integrated with both Twitter and Facebook. Make good use of the Pin Feed, which is similar to Facebook’s Timeline. All of these add up to getting more traffic to your website or blog.

About the Author:  Tom Bukacek is CEO of Black Box Social Media LLC, an online marketing company which utilizes the latest web 2.0 strategies for its clients in order to increase your brand recognition and help get you found online. Black Box Social Media is also the creator of the all in one, do it yourself training program known as ‘Social Media In 7 Minutes’, which has over 50 videos on how to use Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, Google+ and more to market your business. Tom has recently authored a chapter on social media marketing in Dan Kennedy’s upcoming book ‘Marketing Miracles‘ due this fall. For more information on Tom Bukacek and Black Box Social Media, please visit http://blackboxsocialmedia.com/topics/blog