Confession. I love Pinterest but I tend to be kind of a lazy pinner. If I’m pinning something new (rather than repinning), I kind of prefer that the owner of the photo gives me the caption text up front. It’s just one less thing for me to think about. I told you – totally lazy.
Some bloggers and websites use a “pin it” plugin that lets the author designate a preferred image and the caption text which is nice but if I’m totally honest, I rarely pin that way. More often than not I’m pinning from my phone using this method. Even on my laptop, I still tend to use the Pinterest bookmarklet. Habit from before there were fancy tools, I guess.
As a blogger, I have learned that there are definite advantages to predetermining what text goes in the Pinterest caption of my pinned images but I didn’t always know how to control that. The more I learned about SEO, the more I understood the value, in general, of adding alt text to your photos. Once I figured out that the Pinterest bookmarklet pulls the alt text as the default for the pin caption, I started to see how valuable that alt text could be.
If you choose a great SEO-friendly title for your posts, insert that along with your url and some carefully chosen hashtags into the alt text of your blog post images you are pretty much set. Most people pinning from your blog aren’t going to change that text as long as it makes sense for the pin and you get to reap the benefits of those keywords and hashtags. Total win.
Wondering how you change the alt text on your images? Check out this video for step-by-step instructions.
One quick, last note about this. I have heard that search engines would prefer that alt text be used as originally intended – to identify the image even when it doesn’t load for some reason. I am not convinced it makes a huge difference in SEO, though. And since most of my traffic comes from Pinterest, I’m really more concerned with what works best there.
I’d love to hear about it if anyone has a different opinion on this, though. Feel free to discuss in the comments.
Looking for more blogging tips? Check out these posts.
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Interesting. I haven’t been filling out my alt spaces … Thanks for the info! Visiting from Do Tell Tuesday :-).
Heidi recently posted…Charmeuse & Lace Table Runners
Hi Jessica, This post and video are great. I have been looking for awhile, for something that makes it easy to understand. I am in an art challenge this month, and a lot of the artists are not doing this properly, or at all. I am filling it out, but know I know, I am doing it wrong too.
I am going to include a link to you in my post tomorrow. ( I don’t know how to reblog.)
I am following you, and so glad I found your site! I know it will help a lot of artists in the challenge!
Thanks!
Sheila
Awesome! Thanks so much, Sheila!!