SEO tips: open graph meta tags

Our next post will help your publications be better recognised by bots and social nets, and generate more social shares

To launch a successful marketing campaign, you need to create a lot of content. However, content is useless if you do not have an audience to consume it. So how do you make your content visible to as many people as possible? Share it on social media, exactly. But do you know how to properly optimise the content you share via Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and Linkedin?

What is the Open Graph Protocol?

The official Open Graph protocol website says that the protocol enables any web page to become a rich object in a social graph. In other words, it is a group of tags that provide the leading social media networks such as Facebook with detailed information about the webpages you share. This information allows social networks to display a piece of shared content in a better, more user-friendly way. The Open Graph protocol was invented by Facebook and is now managed by the Open Web Foundation.

Why Open Graph Matters

It’s common knowledge that social media is the primary driver of web traffic. Needless to say, anyone dealing with online marketing or running a business online needs to know how to harness the power of Open Graph tags used for social networks. These tags optimise your content, resulting in higher conversion rates.

Open Graph tags have no direct impact on the page’s SEO, but they improve the display and the usability of your links on social media, which is no less essential. Let’s take a look at the key Open Graph tags and how to use them.

(H3) Open Graph Meta Tags

• og:title - this is the title of your page. Make sure that its size doesn’t exceed 65 characters, otherwise it will be truncated.
• og:type - this tag specifies the type of object contained on the page (website, blog, book, film, etc.).
• og:image - this is the URL of the image that represents your page.
• og:url - the main web address of your site.
• og:description - a short description of the page. Make it no longer than two phrases (300 characters).
• og:video - if there is video content on one of the pages, this is the place to put its URL.
• og:locale - the language of the page (en_GB, de_DE, etc.).
• og:site_name - the name of your website.

How to Place Open Graph Tags

Follow these steps to add the Open Graph protocol:

• Add the namespace "http://ogp.me/ns#" to the html tag;
• Place the meta tags with their property and content attributes between the head tags;
• There are four obligatory Open Graph meta tags that you should add every time. These are og:title, og:type, og:image and og:url;
• If your page is content-rich, add other meta tags to optimise how everything will be viewed.

Let’s see what it looks like with real HTML code:

Google+ Meta Tags

If you want to optimise your links for Google+, you should know that there are two ways of doing so. While all leading social media networks recognise Open Graph tags as the primary source of information about the webpage, Google+ first looks for Schema markup, and if that’s not present, it looks for Open Graph tags. Therefore, you can either confine yourself to Open Graph, or optimise your content using Schema markup, which has the same algorithm as the Open Graph protocol, but slightly different tags. Here are the main ones:

name: same as og:title;
description: same as og:description;
image: same as og:image;
author: Google+ user’s profile URL;
publisher: Google+ page URL.

Once you’ve tried implementing these tags into your code, you’ll see how helpful they are. They help your social media shares stand out and generate more clicks, as well as granting you more SEO credibility, all of which results in higher conversion rates.

We’ve only described basic Open Graph functionality in this post. To find out more, you can check out the official Open Graph webpage or consult our development experts, who will be only too happy to help.

Alexander Bessudnov

Chief Product Officer

Alexander is an accomplished Chief Product Owner with a proven track record of leading successful product development initiatives at Magora. With a passion for innovation and a keen understanding of market trends, Alexander plays a pivotal role in shaping Magora's product strategy and ensuring the delivery of cutting-edge solutions to clients.

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