How To Set Up Rich Pins For Your Blog

If you're unaware of how important Pinterest is to the growth of your blog, you need to get on it right away! This social media platform can send traffic to your blog posts like no other platform can. If you want to make this happen, you can really help Pinterest help you by setting up Rich Pins!
What are Rich Pins? You may notice when scrolling through Pinterest, some pins look a little more important than others. The occasional pin will have a bold title underneath the picture and when clicked on, will include more information with several links directing you to the original pinner's website. These, my friends, are called Rich Pins.
Compared to a regular pin, Rich Pins mark your content as your own. There are six types of Rich Pins - Articles, Products, Apps, Movies, Recipes and Places. Most bloggers would set up their Rich Pins as Articles (unless you're a food blogger and Recipes is more suited).

Why are Rich Pins important? Rich Pins have more information attached to them, therefore they help to boost your SEO (search engine optimisation). The content you pin from your website will also look more "trustworthy" and the traffic from Pinterest to your blog is very likely to increase.
You would also know how fast images can spread around Pinterest. One minute you pin something from somewhere, the next minute someone is saving it and re-uploading it as their own image. It's important to set up rich pins so you can claim ownership over what has been pinned from your blog. You deserve every bit of traffic to your blog if one of your images has made its way onto Pinterest!
How do I set it up? I only know how to do it for Blogger, however I believe for Wordpress there's a particular plugin (Yoast SEO?) to use (have a search to find instructions). For those of you who use Blogger:
1. In your Blogger menu go to Settings > Search Preferences and under Meta Tags change the Description section to "enabled". Add in a short description of your blog.

2. Go to Template > Edit HTML, and search (click anywhere in the html box and press CTRL+F on your keyboard to have a search bar pop up) for this code:

<b:includable id='post' var='post'>

3. Directly underneath that line of code, paste this:

<meta expr:content='data:post.title' property='og:title'/> <meta expr:content='data:blog.metaDescription' property='og:description'/> <meta content='article' property='og:type'/> <meta expr:content='data:blog.url' property='og:url'/> <meta expr:content='data:blog.title' property='og:site_name'/> <meta expr:content='data:post.timestampISO8601' property='article:published_time'/> <meta content='BLOG TOPIC' property='article:section'/> <b:loop values='data:post.labels' var='label'> <meta expr:content='data:label.name' property='article:tag'/> </b:loop>

4. Replace 'BLOG TOPIC' with a word that sums up your blog (eg. 'Lifestyle', 'Beauty', 'Fashion'). Click on Save.
5. Go to the Rich Pins Validator and enter the link to your most recent blog post. Click 'validate', check all information is correct and click 'apply'.
6. Wait a couple of days (up to two weeks) and Pinterest will email you to let you know your Rich Pins are now set up!

I have two Pinterest accounts! One for Flip And Style and the other for Blog Pixie. The Flip And Style Pinterest is more lifestyle focused, with boards on style, beauty, interiors and more. Follow the Blog Pixie Pinterest for everything to do with blogging!
 
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