Open Graph: Take Your Company’s Social Media to the Next Level

Previously, we’ve talked about how you should write for people and not search engines. While this is true—treating your visitors like dirty pieces of data to be worked into a conversion isn’t the best—there are SEO practices that you basically have to do to get your website to show up in search results. Unfortunately, these don’t necessarily read like actual sentences. Have you ever read a title tag? If you have, what you found was a lot of keywords and clauses about what you’re looking for.

Now, this is fine—but there is an unexpected problem here. Your title tag and meta description are coded into your webpage in very easy-to-find areas. So when you take that cool link you’ve found on the internet and want to post it on Facebook, Facebook pulls in all that nonsense that was written for the search engines.

If you’re jockeying for attention as it is in newsfeeds, which you are, this is basically shooting yourself in the foot. Now, there are two ways you can fix this. You can actually manually edit the content in the auto-generated content on social media sites (called “cards”). This solves the problem once, but what happens when somebody tries to share your content organically? Chances are, they’re not going to take the time to optimize it for clicks.

That’s where the bridge between web page and social media comes in. Welcome to Open Graph.

What Is Open Graph?

Open Graph is like a translator for your search engine optimized content. Like schema.org, Open Graph is a markup language that gives social media sites the content that’s optimized for real life people to read and click on while they’re surfing through their favorite social media sites.

So how does it work? Mostly through the “og” tag put in the header of the web page (not to be confused with the OG Bobby Johnson tag). Here’s an example of what it looks like:

Now, nobody has time to put in all that for each page or blog post they put live on their site—that would be insane. However, many WordPress SEO plugins are adapting to include markup for Open Graph. This makes optimizing for social media super easy—all you have to do is come up with essentially a second title tag and meta description. It’s worth the time to try to get more clicks to your website on social media.

What Open Graph Means for You

Open Graph makes it even easier for you to fully commit to social media. Having great content helps, but unless you optimize effectively to get people off social media and on to your website, what’s the point? Open Graph helps make producing clickable, engaging content extremely easy. So why aren’t you doing it?

If you need help getting your Facebook, Twitter, Houzz, Pinterest, or Google+ page off the ground, we can help. Contact us today for a free social media analysis!