How much time do you spend on social media…everyday?
My guess is, at least 1 hour!
And during that time I know that you will be spending time on Facebook, Twitter or Pinterest.
You are not alone of course, and that is why it is so vital to optimise your website for social media.
What do I mean by optimising?
I mean, you need to be make it as easy as possible for both you and your website visitors to share your content on social media.
Naturally, the marketing strategy for your business should involve regularly posting to and engaging with social media.
So this strategy will see you often sharing your pages, articles and blog posts on your social channels to increase its visibility.
But, what will users see when you share your website content on social media?
Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest all work in the same way.
When you share your website URL, they will visit that page, grab information from it and display it.
Now, the good news is that you can control what this information is by using special tags in your HTML.
And the cherry on the cake is that you can use the same tags for Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest.
My Website Analyser test
In this analysis, I check for the existence of the Open Graph tags that are the standard for sharing on social media.
How to score well
Create all of these Open Graph tags in the HTML of your website:
<meta property="og:url" content="webpage URL" /><meta property="og:type" content="article" /><meta property="og:title" content="webpage title" /><meta property="og:description" content="webpage description" /><meta property="og:image" content="featured image" />
Let me explain these tags for you:
- og:url, is simply the URL of the current page i.e. the link.
- og:type, should be either “article” or “blog”. When it is an article or a blog post, use “article”. For any other page, including the homepage, use “blog”.
- og:title, can be the same title you use for the title tag.
- og:description, can be the same description you use for the meta description tag.
- Lastly, og:image, should be the URL (path) to the image that you want to be shown on social media. For WordPress, this is usually the feature image.
How to add these tags to your HTML?
If your website is on WordPress, you can download the excellent Yoast plugin from WordPress.org. Otherwise, ask your web developer to add them to the source code.