Make your images Pinterest ready
If you’re creating amazing, engaging content for your website (and I know you are) chances are people will want to share it. On Pinterest it’s all about the images. By taking a few simple steps, you can make your images Pinterest ready and easy to share again and again.
Use strong titles, alt text and descriptions
If you’re like me, you like to have a bit of control over how your content appears when it’s shared online. One way to do that is by providing the description that appears when someone pins one of your images to Pinterest. Here’s how you do it.
Whenever you upload an image to your media library, be sure to fill in these three fields: title, alt text and description. The title will be filled in automatically, but you can overwrite that. Briefly describe what the image is about — this is an opportunity to use some keywords. And include your name and your website to make sure you’re building your brand awareness.
We put this information in all three fields because, honestly, it’s not always clear where Pinterest will pull the description from. It’s safest to put it in all three fields. This is also a good SEO practice for when those Google bots are crawling your website.
Create an image that is optimized for Pinterest
Another way to make your images easy to share on Pinterest is by creating them in the correct dimensions. According to Pinterest, the optimum dimensions are 735 pixels wide by 1102 pixels high. To make your Pinterest images quickly and easily, you can go to Canva.com and use one of their templates and customize it to suit your purpose.
Save a Secret Pinterest-Ready Image On Your Website
Pinterest-ready images, in their long, skinny dimension, may not be suitable for the design of your website. Most websites are designed with short, wide images to minimize scrolling. There’s a fairly simple way to embed a secret Pinterest image on your page that displays only when someone clicks the Pin It button.
Start by going to the visual editor in your WordPress site. At the bottom of your content, add your Pinterest-ready images that you’ve already created (with your strong title, alt text and description, of course).
Now switch over to the Text editor and scroll down to the bottom to the code for the image your just added — it should start with “<img” — and add this bit of code: style=”height: 1px; opacity: 0;”. This will hide the image from view on the post but will make it available for pinning.
So now, when someone wants to pin this post to Pinterest, you see my Pinterest-ready image among the images available to pin.
And that’s it. Three simple ways to make your images Pinterest ready. Try them out and let me know how they work out for you.
