Optimizing Pinterest Profile to Drive Massive Traffic to Your Site

Pinterest is one of the best traffic sources for a website. It is an effective social media that drives massive traffic there by conversions to a business site or subscriptions to blogs. It helps both the business owners, bloggers, marketers as well as social media freaks to increase their fan base on internet and there by increasing their reach.

Getting started with pinterest with ordinary or incomplete profile information may not help you even your strategies are worthy enough to get people engagement.

I have researched and implemented the best pinterest optimization strategies in the market to drive traffic to my website and I have been successful since then. I would like to share those techniques and I wish you see success more sooner that I got.

Optimizing your pinterest account covers the optimization of the following areas on your profile.

1. Profile image
2. Account name
3. Account description
4. Linking your site
5. Location (of the business)
6. Linking with other social networking profiles

1. Profile image that adds your personality to branding

The profile image in any social network is the appealing part of the profile that catches visitor’s interest. Just like that, the profile picture on Pinterest will give the first impression for the visitor.

A genuine smiling close up will copy happiness on the visitors face too. Use the same profile image that you use on other social networks. This will help your visitors identify your face quickly.

A general picture like as shown below can portray your profile as personal than a professional one.

A complete logo as your profile picture would do better promotion of your website or business than a smiling picture but, people would not like to follow brands unless they are famous enough.

So what's the best optimization?

Overlay your logo in the bottom of your profile picture to make it look professional more than of personal. When someone shares your pins, your profile picture will be shown with the logo and can give your site the best promotion in both ways.

A profile picture like as shown below does its best in getting followers and adds your personality to the profile as well as promotes a brand.



Pinterest will take the profile images of size 600x600px and will reduce them to 165x165px after uploading. The edges would be slightly cropped and make sure it fits the space correctly.

Use online photo editing tools or Photoshop to create/edit your own combo profile picture.

2. Account name that increases brand recognition

Your profile name should not only increase your personality but also brand recognition. A normal profile name like ‘Sasidhar Kareti’ can only display my name to my profile visitors but a name like ‘Sasidhar Kareti {Amfas Tech}’ will also help me promote my website.

If someone new comes to visit my profile, he would notice the string ‘Amfas Tech’ along with my name which would remind him when he sees any of my site links or other social profiles on the internet in future.

3. Account description that is authoritative

The profile description adds the authority of your website on your profile. Pinterest allows only 160 characters in the profile description. So choose the right words to fill-in information about yourself.

What to include?

• About your business
• About your pins
• The tagline of your website or business
• Keywords regarding your website or business

4. Linking your website

Add your website URL to the profile that will showcase it on your profile page. In fact, linking your site will allow people to find the website source of your pins.

You should verify your site by adding the snippet of code on your website. A verified website would help the world confirm that you own that website and thus proves your authority that we talked about previously.

To verify a website, go to Settings >> Profile >> Add URL of your website and click on the ‘Verify’ link to get the snippet of code.

Once the code is added, refresh the Pinterest page and you will see a verified mark beside the website link.

5. Location of the business

I think I don’t have to say tell you about the importance of the locality specification. A business with locality specification would get the highest priority on search engines as we have seen the pigeon update doing the same recently.

So many business websites that haven’t specified the locality on any of their pages have paid the price for the Google local search algorithm. Pinterest hasn’t come up with any local search algorithm yet but can be expected as a possibility.

Moreover, a business with specified locality on the website will earn much trust from visitors than making them believe in some kind of internet business with no physical address.

What about blogs or real internet businesses?

If you are running a blog or internet businesses, give the city name, state and country you live in very frequently or the city in your quick reach. You may also choose to provide a combination of city, state, and country in the location field.

Benefits of giving your location

• Makes your business look more real
• Makes your blog look more humanly updated one with your profile information

Cons of giving your location information

• It reveals your privacy on the internet
• May lead to the overlapped time of consulting in family hours

6. Linking with other social networking profiles

Your every social networking profile including a Pinterest profile on the web should not work individually for you. You should maintain perfect sync among all the profiles which helps your visitors also visit on their favorite social media.

Let us suppose a guy X loves to hang out on facebook all the time. If he visits my Pinterest profile which he finds out interesting but doesn’t want to follow me on Pinterest. This results in I ending up losing a follower of my blog updates.

To connect your Pinterest profile to facebook and twitter, go to Settings >> Social Networks >> Turn on the link to all the other social profiles.



Benefits of linking to other social profiles

• Will give more choices to your profile visitor to follow you on different social media profiles.
• Will help other social network fans follow pinterest updates by linking to its timeline.
• Will keep track your pinterest activity on your other profiles.

Cons of linking to other social profiles

• Will loop automated updates sent through Buffer app or Hoot suite.
• Cannot flexible automate website updates.

7. Adding ‘Pinit’ widgets

Social media widgets ever play fair. Just like Facebook’s like box, Twitter's embedded tweets, Google+ page widget, Pinterest also provides different kind of widgets for website to increase the fan base on the network.

My favorite widget from one of those is the hover ‘Pinit’ button which you can see on amfastech.com by hovering your mouse on to the images in the content. It increases my pinterest referrals that can help the article rank good in SERP.

One more word

Pinterest is a wonderful platform to get as much social referral traffic as you can. In fact it has billions of users and every day millions of pins are being pinned to the boards. Some businesses get highest traffic only from pinterest compared to leading giants like Facebook and Twitter.

Optimize your pinterest profile, get more referrals and get ranked well on SERPs. All the best!