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And for that, they have a massive list of options you can include. Most of the focus with the Twitter tags is in having more control over manipulating how the card representing your webpage appears on their platforms. In my experience, these tags are only used by Twitter, as most other social platforms assume either the OG tags or the generic meta tags (title, description). Twitter also has its own protocol separate from Facebook and Open Graph. Tool #2: Facebook Debugger Twitter Card Validator This provides a means for previewing how your pages are going to show up on Facebook, and that can reasonably inform you on how they should show up on other platforms as well. (While it's not optional, you should also consider og:description to be one of the primary tags you include on every page.)īecause Facebook is the leader in this space, it also takes on the responsibility of providing developers and publishers with a tool for validating the OG tags for any given URL. The Open Graph protocol builds on these existing technologies and gives developers one thing to implement.Īs I mentioned, Facebook (and others) will attempt to fall back to your basic meta tags if it doesn't find Open Graph (OG) tags, but because OG has become a social sharing standard, it is important to implement at least the primary OG tags on any page your publish to your site. While many different technologies and schemas exist and could be combined together, there isn't a single technology which provides enough information to richly represent any web page within the social graph. While Facebook uses Open Graph to display its preview cards on shared links, Open Graph is meant to be a social sharing standard across the web. You can put in any link and the Hey Meta tool will show you what meta it finds (or guess what it should be), and also provides an easy way to fill in the content yourself and generate the appropriate tags to drop into your page.įacebook developed the Open Graph protocol. One tool that does a great job with helping with these tags is Hey Meta. Even if they have platform-specific tags (like Facebook and Twitter), if they don't find their tags, they are going to look to the generic title and description to know what to display. Many services that allow for sharing web links will use these values. SEO experts at Moz suggest a few key tags (click link in last sentence to read) but for social sharing, the important ones are title and description.
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The most important piece is that you have the essential meta tags. When you are the author of such content it's important that you have control over the information that gets displayed when others share links to your content. there is often some sort of preview of that page which shows (if available) a title, text snippet, and image.
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When a webpage gets shared - on Facebook, Twitter, Slack, Medium, etc.
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