Why should I use Open Graph meta tags?
Open Graph meta tags provide essential information about your web pages, allowing them to be displayed effectively when shared on platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. These tags help you take control of how your content appears, ensuring that your audience sees the most attractive and informative preview of your page.
Using Open Graph meta tags not only enhances the aesthetics of your social media shares with rich images and descriptions but also improves click-through rates.
Why should I use Twitter meta tags?
Using Twitter meta tags will allow you customize the card of your webpage on Twitter news feed. It is not mandatory to use them because like Facebook, Twitter can also use the Open Graph protocol in absence of the Twitter tags to display the page in an attractive fashion.
Twitter meta tags are specific to Twitter and are used to optimize how your content appears on that platform. Open Graph meta tags, on the other hand, are more versatile and can be used to improve content sharing on a broader range of social media platforms, making them a more general and widely applicable choice for enhancing the presentation of web pages on the social web. However, for the best results, it's often advisable to use both types of tags for comprehensive social media optimization.
How Open Graph tags work?
Social tags are most common on blog pages because the authors want their content to be spread over multiple medias in order to attract more visitors. Obviously a blog page would include social media buttons that will allow users to share the specific blog story on other platforms like Facebook, Instagram etc. Open Graph will enhance the appearance of the shared article or page by integrating it into a customizable container or card. The card can have an image, a title, a description, tags, keywords and many more items that can make the card more unique and pleasent to the eye of the audience.
Example of basic Open Graph tags
Here are the basic Open Graph tags that a webpage or article must have in order to be shared on the social platforms:
og:title- the title of the shared page. It can be the same title as your page or something different. This is the heading of the shared page/article.og:type- type of content to be shared. An image, a movie etc.og:image- an image or a thumbnail that will be displayed inside the container.og:url- the canonical URL of the page or article.
How can I add Open Graph tags on my page?
Open Graph tags are HTML meta tags. This means that they must be included inside the <head> section of the HTML page like any other meta tag. There is no automatic mechanism that can integrate the social tags in your webpage because the HTML file must be modified and thus you must manually insert them.
This is how the <head> section looks like after adding the social tags:
<head>- ...
- <title>Title of Webpage</title>
- <meta property="og:title" content="Title of Webpage" />
- <meta property="og:type" content="video.movie" />
- <meta property="og:url" content="https://example.com/path-to-video/" />
- <meta property="og:image" content="https://example.com/path-to-image.jpg" />
- ...
- </head>
If you don't have HTML knowledge or are unsure how to follow the necessary steps to add your meta social tags ask the developer to do it for you.
