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Knowing exactly which social meta tags to include can be confusing even to experienced webmasters. We know from experience and studies that the right data, including optimized images, helps content to spread, which often leads to increased links and mentions.
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The implications for SEO are also significant. Think of it as conversion rate optimization for social exposure. This allows us to optimize for sharing Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and Pinerest by defining exactly how titles, descriptions, images and more appear in social streams. You can validate Pinterest Rich Pins here.At Moz, we strive to include social media metadata in all new pieces of content that we publish. Recipes are a little more complex as the markup is fused with the HTML body itself - there's a Schema method, then there's a full-HTML method - you'll need to decide which is best for you. Let's take a look at Open Graph for Pinterest Rich Pins. Pinterest has a very strong audience of food lovers and online shoppers, which is why there are options to share content as "Rich Pins", which essentially formats the shared Pins as recipes and purchasable products respectively. While not strictly a meta tag (it's actually a [HTML alternative of the article), it's certainly an interesting way of getting your content out there. Don't worry, there's no "duplicate content" penalty (as mentioned in last week's article) because the "canonical URL" meta tag is used. Instant Articles are articles that load faster on Facebook because they're hosted on Facebook. As mentioned before, it's best to use all three syntaxes as a safety measure. Google+ also uses the Open Graph syntax as backup, and Pinterest also has a few optional meta tags for Schema that I'd recommend reading about. Besides that, you never when Google will suddenly make Schema more useful. Schema is a little longer and less attractive than Open Graph, but it's also richer as it allows the opportunity to specify related content. Schema is mostly used to define sharable content on Google+, however Pinterest also uses Schema as an alternative to Open Graph (it's totally fine, if not recommended to use both). Note: there is a difference between twitter:site" and twitter:creator" - "site" is your website's Twitter handle, and "creator" is the handle of the author.
Social media meta checker code#
If you want to do the complete opposite and block users from pinning your content, this is the code snippet you're looking for:Īlthough it has some Open Graph elements, Twitter uses a standard meta tag syntax to define sharable content, and also lets you validate the meta tags with their very own card validator (Twitter calls them cards). If you're into programming, here's an interesting solution for that - if not, simply use whichever is most beneficial to you or Schema alongside Open Graph. Note 2: the "article:author" property should be your name or website name for Pinterest, although this conflicts with the Open Graph requirements for Facebook.
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Note 1: Facebook has a few other optional meta tags (slight variations for image and video sharing) that you might want to check out. Here's what a standard Open Graph snippet looks like: For Facebook, it allows developers to specify which title, URL and image to use when sharing the webpage (+ some other things), and for Pinterest it's pretty much the same. Open Graph is a syntax used by both Facebook and Pinterest. That's where social media meta tags come into it. In fact, there aren't really any sharable images on the website - none that would look attractive in a tweet anyway. However, as you can see, this image doesn't appear on the website itself. When you share this site on social media, this is the image that is used: With these meta tags, you can create unique text/image combinations for sharing. Often enough, the most sharable text/image combination is specifically designed for each social channel and hidden from view on the website itself. Social media meta tags aren't required, but they help webpages become more sharable, and as a result, they'll boost social media engagement.Įverything from the text used to the image chosen can be tweaked to increase the amount of likes, shares and retweets, and often enough, this text isn't the text that appears in the, or an image that appears on the website. Last week we took a refined look at which meta tags are required and/or relevant in 2017, what they do, the HTML syntax, and how exactly they should be implemented.
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