The Importance and Use of OG tags

What is an OG Tag?

OG tags, or open graph meta tags are very popular for use in social media such as Facebook and Twitter. The very large amount of people using social media such as Facebook and Twitter makes it a great place for sharing. This makes social media great for marketing.

In 2010 Facebook introduced Open Graph to the world. Open Graph allows for integration between Facebook and other websites. This allows for some control over how information travels from third-party websites to Facebook when a page is shared. To do this, information is sent by Open Graph meta tags in thepart of the website’s code. Other popular social media websites such as Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google followed Facebook and began to use Open Graph tags. One important note is Twitter which has meta tags of its own. However, if Twitter robots can’t find any then Twitter will use Open Graph in place of the meta tags.

Put more simply, open graph meta tags can allow you to control what will show up when a page is shared on Facebook. If you want to take advantage of this and turn your page into graph objects then you need to add basic metadata to your page.

How can you use OG tags?

There are four required properties for every page. The four required properties are:

Og:title: the title of your object as it should appear on your page.

Og:type: simply the type of object. This could include videos, pictures, or other objects.

Og:image: as the name implies, the URL of an image.

og:url: the URL that will be used in the graph.

There are many tags that you may opt to use. Some are more advanced than others. No matter what tags are used Open Graph is an increasingly popular and versatile way to change and control the content of your social media page. So if you’re trying to optimize your website, OG tags should be part of your plan