Pinterest is a social media website in which you can share or “pin” images that you are interested in, and follow the activity of your friends and other likeminded subscribers.
The site was originally launched in March 2010 and, since then it has grown to have over 11 million subscribers and more than 104 million visits every month. Pinterest is such a useful tool for online business owners as it accounts for more referral traffic than Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+.
With the major algorithm changes that Google has put in place this year, traditional link building strategies no longer hold much weight with regards to ranking. It seems that unless your site has a high page rank, a decent link exchange is hard to find. With this in mind, link building has now taken a massive shift towards social media and the use of both infographics and video content.
Sharing imagery on Facebook or Twitter will only reach your followers and, unless they share the content with their friends; it is unlikely that you will gain any new business this way. Pinterest, however, allows you “pin” your images so that whenever someone searches for something similar; your image will come up for anyone to share. For example, say you run a cupcake business. Pinning images of your cupcakes will make them available to anyone who searches “cupcake” in Pinterest. They can then share your image; if their Pinterest account is linked up to their Facebook account then your image will also be shared on their Facebook timeline. This way you can potentially get millions of unique viewers that you wouldn’t get though Facebook or Twitter alone. Adding a link to your images will drive traffic back through to your main site which will significantly increase your rate of unique visitors.
These kinds of links are much more natural as people sharing your imagery are genuinely interested in your product. Google recognises this and classes these links as much more authoritative than the standard link exchange, so adopting this link building strategy will have a much more significant impact on your SERP rankings in the long run.