How to Add Pinterest Rich Pins for Articles to Your Blog {WordPress & Blogger}

• Branding – Your brand name and logo are embedded in each pin.
• Call to action – Each pin directs the reader to your website.
• Enhanced pin description – Rich pins pick up the meta description of your article as the pin description.

Below is the dissection of a rich pin – a screenshot of all the elements that comprise a rich article pin as visible inside the pin. As you can see, rich pins do help build your brand, and your traffic!

This step by step tutorial will teach you How to Add Pinterest Rich Pins for Articles to Your Blog! First, I will be explaining how to do it for WordPress self-hosted blogs and then for blogger sites.

How to Add Rich Pins for WordPress  {Self-Hosted}

I’m part of the leadership team at Love God Greatly – an online Bible study for women. I volunteer my time there to help Angela in the technical aspects. For this tutorial, I am using LoveGodGreatly.com and their Pinterest profile as example.

 Step 1:

Download the free Yoast SEO Plugin. Upload and then activate it from your WordPress dashboard ‘Install Plugin’ page .

Step 2: 

Select “SEO” on your WordPress dashboard and click on the “Social“tab that pops up.

Step 3:

Select the checkbox that says, “Add Open Graph meta data” and save changes.

Step 4:

Go to the Rich Pin Validator. Enter the URL of one of your blog posts in the field provided and click “Validate“.

Step 5:

A message stating that your pin has been validated will be displayed (In case you get a blank page as I did, you only need to refresh the page). Then click “Apply Now“.

Step 6:

Select “HTML Tags” option in the pop up and again click “Apply Now“.

Step 7:

You’re done! You now need to wait for approval from Pinterest in the form of an email, which could take any time between a couple of days to a couple of weeks!

This is a one-time process, and once your site has been approved, images from the respective blog posts will have rich snippet added to the pin. Older pins from your site will also be progressively updated as rich pins, but it could take a while for the changes to show on Pinterest.

Please Note: By experimenting a bit, I found that only images associated with a particular article/blog post will be shown as rich pins. Images on the sidebar and other graphic elements might not be displayed as rich pins.

How to Add Rich Pins for Blogger {BlogSpot}

The procedure for Blogger requires a bit of coding, but I hope this step by step procedure will demystify it for you. My friend Rosilind Jukic of A Little R & R allowed me to use her blogger account for this tutorial.

Step 1:

On Blogger, click on “Settings” and under that, “Search Preferences“. Click ‘Edit‘ and ‘Enable’ the Description for Meta Tags. This will enable you to add a meta description (Search Description) when you create a new blog post or edit an old one.

Step 2:

Backup your Blogger template using the steps outlined here.

Step 3:

Select Template on Blogger and click “Edit HTML“.

Step 4:

Search for the following piece of code: (Using Ctrl+F or Cmd+F)

<b:includable id=’post’ var=’post’>

Step 5:

Add the following code after the piece of code you found in the previous step:

<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=’Technology‘ property=’article:section’/>
<b:loop values=’data:post.labels’ var=’label’>
<meta expr:content=’data:label.name’ property=’article:tag’/>
</b:loop>

Change “Technology” (marked in red above) to your blog’s core topic and save the changes. After making changes, please check your blog in two browsers of your choice. Verify that your site is looking fine, just the way it was before!

Step 6:

Follow Steps 4, 5, 6 and 7 from the WordPress tutorial above to get your Rich Pins validated and approved.

Note: It is important that you enter a meta description for each blog post you write, only then will it be visible in the Rich Pins on Pinterest. For WordPress, you can enter the meta description in the Yoast Plugin module under each blog post, and for Blogger, you can enter it in the Search Description box.

Have you enabled Rich Pins on your blog? What’s holding you back?