Pinterest for Business and All in One SEO Pack

The two main steps are to create a Pinterest for Businsess account, and then confirm your website.

Get Set up on Pinterest for Business

• Go to Pinterest for Business and click on “Join as a Business”
• Fill out the “Create a Business Account” form:
  • I selected “Other” as the business type;
  • You need to choose an email address that doesn’t already have an account with Pinterest. I ended up using my gmail account so I used the “+” to “generate” a new email address. Meaning, if my email address at gmail.com was foo@gmail.com, I used foo+sailinghall@gmail.com. Pinterest recognized it as a separate email address, but gmail directs emails to foo+sailinghall@gmail.com to the regular foo@gmail.com address.
  • I filled in username, business name, and website all as expected, and left the rest of the fields alone.
• Go to your email account and confirm your email address following the directions in the email.

Confirm Your Website

• Back at Pinterest, click on your account name in the upper right, and select Settings from the menu.
• Click on Edit Profile.
• Click on Verify Website (the name of the website should already have been filled in from your “Create a Business Account” page earlier.
• Click on Verify with a meta tag.
• Copy the value in the content attribute to your clipboard.
• In other tab, log in to your WordPress admin account. From the dashboard menu on the left select “All in One SEO Pack” and “General Settings”.
• Scroll down to “Pinterest Site Verification” under “Webmaster Verification” and paste the code that you copied from Pinterest.
• Scroll down to the bottom and click “Update Options”
• After the WordPress settings are saved, go back to your Pinterest tab, and click “Complete Verification”. Interestingly, there’s no feedback if this is successful, but if you click “Complete Verification” a second time, it will tell you that the site has already been verified. Click on the X to dismiss the Verify Your Website dialog.
• While saving my “Profile”, I had to fix the website name to include “http://” in front of the website name. The “Create a Business Account’ page had stripped the http:// that I originally added.

Back on the Pinterest Account Settings page, there are a lot of options to associate your Pinterest account with many other social networks. I suppose this makes sense, but I haven’t done it myself. It reminds me to think about my social networking strategy though.