A real quick little Pinterest tip for you today! If you’re anything like me, you use the Pinterest “Pin It” browser button like mad when you’re surfing the web. I use it constantly when looking up recipes and reading social media related articles. But it drives me crazy when I hit “Pin It” and the descriptions under all of the photo options that you can pin make no sense or are just gobbledygook (likely the tag or name of the photo when it was uploaded).
Some blogs and websites consistently don’t rename their photos as they upload them to a proper name that would appear as a tag, even though it’s a benefit to them as well if they do (I’ll tell you why in a bit).
An example of an automatic description that appears with this photo. Obviously we don’t want to pin it as it is!
In the example from Hootsuite’s blog above, they have changed it for two of the photos, but not the one most obvious to pin (ed. note: I do love Hootsuite and their blog; this was just the first one I found when looking for an example!). I’ve seen some that don’t have decent descriptions on any.
If the description is something like pictured above, we obviously don’t want to pin it as is, and I don’t want to have to type in the article title myself (it takes precious seconds, you know!). But there is a solution! And I found this completely randomly one day when I went to copy the title so I could paste it in the description box. If you highlight the title of the article (or whatever you want the description to be if it’s on the page), then click “Pin It”, whatever you highlighted will be the text description in every single photo option to pin. Voila!
Highlight the text that you want to be the description of the picture you’re going to pin…
…and then hit Pin It!
Doesn’t that look nicer? And will save you time from having to change the description yourself!
Now, on the flip side, if you’re a blogger who wants to make sure your photos come up with a good description when someone pins them, now you’re thinking! You can set it to be whatever you want!
When you upload your photo, make sure you add an alt + tag (see what it looks like in WordPress below). This also helps with SEO for your blog post. If you don’t add your alt text, it defaults to the picture name which is usually not something descriptive enough. You can even go so far as to put your blog title or address in it (like I did), so if people don’t change the Pinterest description (and many don’t) it’ll carry your blog name through.
Changing the alt text will change the description of the photo when someone tries to pin it.
My favourite lifestyle/cooking blog, The Londoner (pictured below), does a great job – I didn’t have to highlight or change anything when I tried to pin this article.
The Londoner does a great job tagging their photos with good descriptions.
There. Now if everyone would do this, I’d be a happy gal!
Filed under: Blogging, Pinterest Tagged: alt text, photos, Pin It, Pinterest
