Perfecting Your Social Shares With OG Tags
Your organization has done everything right: created interesting content, uploaded it to the website, and shared it with your followers on social media. So why does the link look blank when you share it to Facebook?
When sharing links on social media, social platforms have implemented what are known as ‘social cards.’ These cards display automatically when you share a link on a social platform like Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter. Social cards dynamically pull in information they gather from meta tags on your website.
What is a meta tag?
Meta elements are tags within your website’s header code that provides search engines with descriptors, or metadata, about the content on the web page. In 2010, Facebook introduced Open Graph (OG), which assists integration between Facebook and other websites, like yours, by using the OG meta tags in the website’s code. This metadata tells social platforms what title, image, type, description, URL, etc. to show when a link is shared. OG meta tags are recognized by nearly every major platform, so they are the most commonly used.
How can I use OG meta tags?
If you control your website, you can implement the tags in the <head> section of the desired page. If you have a CMS like WordPress, you can download the Yoast SEO plugin. Yoast makes it easy to fill in various fields for social cards, like the image, title, and description. OG tags do not affect on-site SEO, as they do not translate to search engines. Fortunately, Yoast also has the option to fill in metadata about your page for search engines. If you do not have WordPress and instead use another CMS, there are plugins available for Joomla and Drupal, and Squarespace offers the choice to change the metadata within the page Settings.
