Social Media Integration is Key for SEO

With the proliferation of social media on the internet and the importance of SEO in order to get traffic to your website, site owners need to ensure that their online presence is friendly to a variety of social networks; such as Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus to name a few. Similar to how a website requires the standard Header HTML tags for Title and Description to describe the page to search engines, social media specific tags can be implemented to better describe your page to these various social media networks.

Why use Open Graph?

In order to better integrate your website with sites like Facebook, your pages need to become rich ‘graph’ objects which will function the same way as any other Facebook object. This is easily accomplished by implementing the Open Graph protocol meta tags.

For the best results, use these Open Graph meta tags:

  • og:title – The title of the page.
  • og:type – Specifies the type of page object.  This can be ‘website’, ‘article’, ‘product’ or many object types.
  • og:image – An image that represents a particular page object. 
  • og:url – The URL to the page resource.
    og:locale – Represents the language territory for a page.  For a USA based English page use ‘en_US’
  • og:site_name – The name of your website, which is different than the page title.

Additional Meta tags

Depending on the type of page object being specified additional meta tags are available.

Article:

  • article:author – A link to the article author’s Facebook page.
  • article:publisher – A link to the article publisher’s Facebook page.
  • article:published_time – The date when the article was published.
  • article:section – A description of the article section. Example: ‘Front Page’
  • article:tag – A tag that describes the topic of the article. Example: ‘Technology’

Product:

  • product:price:amount – The price of the product displayed in decimal format. Example: ‘34.00’
  • product:price:currency – The currency used for the product price. Example: ‘USD’
  • product:availability – The product availability. Allowed values: 'instock', 'oos', or 'pending'.
  • product:brand – The product’s brand or manufacturer.
  • product:category – Product category. Example: ‘Jewelry’

There are just a few examples of the type of Open Graph meta tags used for specific page object types.  Please visit the Open Graph website for a list of other types or visit the Facebook developer page.

Benefits of implementing Twitter Cards.

Although sharing a web page via Twitter is easy, a website owner will want to control the way the page content is shared with other Twitter users. This is where Twitter Card meta tags come in handy. By adding the Twitter Card specific meta tags to a page, you have oversight over how Twitter presents the readers with a preview of your page content.

The basic version of the Twitter Card is ‘Summary Card’ and it includes the following possible meta tags:

  • twitter:card – The type of Twitter Card
  • twitter:site – The Twitter handle of the content owner
  • twitter:title – Title of the page
  • twitter:description – Brief description of the page
  • twitter:image – An image representing the page

These simple Twitter Card meta tags added to your page will vastly improve the consumption experience of the user.

How to improve your brand with Google+

Linking your brand with Google+ is achieved by adding a ‘Publisher” meta tag within the ‘head’ section of your web page. This tag is used by Google to link your Google+ page to its brand search, thus significantly improving your brand presents on the web.

Shopodex and social media integration.

Rather than having to worry about these various social media integration point, Shopodex offers this functionality automatically. When you create a new page or product, our platform will automatically create the various social media specific meta tags.