Open Graph meta tags are inserted into a webpage’s <head> section.
Their job is to tell social media platforms how to display your content when someone shares your link.
They were originally created by Facebook, but platforms like LinkedIn, X (formerly Twitter), Discord, and even iMessage have picked them up since. By using them they ensure consistency and control in how a link appears.
Open Graph makes shared links look clean and clickable.
How do Open Graph meta tags help with SEO?
Open Graph meta tags don’t influence your rankings in Search Engines like Google or Bing directly.
Google’s ranking algorithm ignores them.
However, they significantly influence social media click-through rate, indirectly affecting your SEO over time.
A compelling preview can lead to more clicks and more traffic. More traffic means better engagement. That makes Google sees your page as useful. Usefulness is a factor for rankings.
To put it another way, Open Graph meta tags don’t directly improve your SEO, but they improve your content’s performance where it matters most—with real people.
They are also very helpful on Social Media platforms since first impressions matter. If your blog post shows up on FB with a broken thumbnail or generic title, people will ignore it.
But a well-tagged preview with an elegant image and clear description feels more share worthy.
For those publishing content, be it a blog or product page, why not spend a little extra time to perfect it?
Here is an example of a LinkedIn card posted for freeCodeCamp.
What are the most important Open Graph properties?
The first important Open Graph property would be the title.
Here is an example of setting the Open Graph title for this blog’s homepage.
For the property attribute, you will need to specify that this is an Open Graph property.
We see that the content attribute is where you write the title you want to be displayed on social media sites.
Next in line of important OG properties is the type property.
Let’s see an example of using the Open Graph type for this website’s homepage.
The kind of content shared on social media is specified by the “type” property.
This content includes, for example, articles, websites, videos, and music.
The image is another important OG property.
Here is an example of using an OG image for this blog’s homepage.
All of these images should be of high quality, with good dimensions and ratios.
Most social media platforms include criteria for image requirements to help you ensure that your content displays well on their site.
For example: the developers.facebook.com documentation page states that we must use images that are at least 1200×630 pixels for the best display on high resolution devices.
The fourth important Open Graph property would be the URL.
Here is an example of sending the Open Graph URL for the lambroshatzinikolaou.com homepage.
There are many more Open Graph properties that you can set, like the description, audio, video and locale.
However, the Open Graph URL, image, type and title are the most important ones to include.
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