If you go over to the official advice from Pinterest about how to get Rich Pins enabled on your site you’ll be met with a bunch of incredibly complicated steps that are intended to be used by programming experts. But don’t let that put you off the idea! It is actually incredibly easy to get rich pins for your site. So easy in fact that you’ll be sorry you didn’t do it sooner.
What are Rich Pins?
If you’ve spent any time on Pinterest (and as a blogger you really should) then you’re pretty well aware of what pins look like. You’ve got the eye catching image and below the image, you have bold text that says the title of the article. If you’re just starting out you’ll find that your pins don’t have this. They also don’t have the extra information that makes your pins easier to find. It’s good for your Pinterest SEO to have rich pins and priority in searches are given to rich pins. This will absolutely jump start your pin’s ability to go viral.
How Do You Get Rich Pins?
If you go to Pinterest’s Help section to find out more about enabling rich pins you’re met with this…
“Add Open Graph or Schema.org markups between the <head> </head> section of your HTML code for each page you want to enable article Rich Pins on. Here are the required Rich Pin fields for each type of markup. Edit the highlighted fields to reflect your articles.”
…What? Scary! I know. But it actually isn’t scary at all, because someone has done all that complicated stuff for you.
Step 1
Do you use Yoast SEO Plugin on your site? If you aren’t using it you need to be for so many reasons. Right now the reason we’re looking at though is Pinterest Rich Pins.
Once you have Yoast installed click on it in the menu to go into Yoast’s settings. Here you will want to go to the Features tab. You can find the different tabs up across the top.
Find Advanced Settings Pages and make sure it is enabled.
Step 2
Go to Pinterest’s Rich Pin Validator and scroll down until you see the blue button that says Validate. Right next to that is a spot for you to put a link from your website. You will want to make this one of your blog posts or articles, something you would want to put on Pinterest. Not the homepage.
Step 3
Once you’ve pushed Validate you should see a message that says “Your pin’s been validated!” Once you see that click Apply Now. Then you’ll see a popup with your website and HTML Tags selected. Click Apply Now one more time and this will apply you to the Rich Pin program!
See how easy that was!?! Thank you, Yoast!
You’ll get an email from Pinterest when you’ve been accepted and all your previous pins will automatically update to be rich pins! This took about a day for me, your results may vary.
If you’d like more blogging tips and support check out Departure Lounge, a Facebook group set up to support travel bloggers and help them reach a wider audience.
