How to create Pinterest Rich Pins from your website content

Playing with the big boys

Having Pinterest Rich Pins are a must if you want to earn Pinterest player points and appear on the top of search results.

I’m gonna get a bit technical here, but I’ll try to stay comprehensible.

So let’s get started!

What are Pinterest Rich Pins?

Rich Pins are basically exactly the same as normal pins, with the exception that they show some extra metadata on your pin.

This data, depending on the type of pin in question, could be the author of an article, the ingredients and cooking directions of a recipe, a product’s price and availability, and so on. There are 6 types of Rich Pins: app, article, movie, place, product and recipe Pins.

Remember that it’s the user who would save your web page as a pin, so it’s really your preparation of the page that would save it as a Pinterest Rich Pin.
The preparation, which consists of two steps: adding some metadata added to your content, and applying on Pinterest’s website for Rich Pins, has a few very simple rules to follow.

The metadata: get ready to write some code

Metadata is basically added information to a media element. Be it text, an image or a video, metadata can reveal some information about the media in question.

Adding metadata in HTML is done simply by creating an additional parameter inside the media element’s HTML tag, for example:

<span>How to create Pinterest Rich Pins from your website content</span> by <span>Shay Stibelman</span>
<img src="http://blog.stibelman.com/images/articleImage.png"/>
<span>Pinterest has long been a fully fledged search engine. Rich Pins will help your pins to appear in the top of their amazing search results page!<span>

Would become:

<span itemprop="name" content="How to create rich pins from your website content">How to create Pinterest Rich Pins from your website content</span> by <span itemprop="author" content="Shay Stibelman">Shay Stibelman</span>
<img itemprop="image" src="http://blog.stibelman.com/images/articleImage.png" alt="How to create rich pins from your website content" />
<span itemprop="description">Pinterest has long been a fully fledged search engine. Rich Pins will help your pins to appear in the top of their amazing search results page!</span>

As you can see, the added code is nothing more than a title and a description of the media element surrounded by an HTML tag (in this case span which is a simple spanning of text).

Of course you don’t have to come up with the code by yourself, but you can use browse Pinterest’s code, copy paste it onto your pages and change the data according to your content.

Author: Shay Stibelman

Digital marketing consultant in Milan, Italy. Born in Israel, raised in Germany by Russian parents. I help small and medium businesses get their digital marketing game on point. Perfect their website, landing pages, funnel marketing and social media strategies, in order to increase ROI and optimize that ever elusive marketing budget. View all posts by Shay Stibelman