Category: Coaching

If you have a website for personal branding, you should know about Open Graph meta tags, also known as OG tags.

Open Graph tags are snippets of code that control how your content looks on social media. Facebook introduced them in 2010 to encourage more content sharing by users, and many prominent social media platforms, including LinkedIn and X (Twitter), have since adopted them.

Whenever you share on social media articles found on the web that you think will be of value and interest to your audience, chances are the post will look eye-catching, with an image accompanied by a title and a brief description.

In addition to the content looking eye-catching, articles with OG tags make the source look authoritative.

Eye-catching + Authoritative = Shareability. This is why you should use OG tags for the content you create in your area of expertise.

Open Graph tags also help with SEO!

These four Open Graphs will give you a solid foundation for sharing content from your website or blog on social media:

og:image

This is an image from the article, blog post, or page you want to be shared on social media – the most important of the OG tag to get right so your content looks eye-catching when shared.

Syntax

<meta property=”og:image” content=”https://www.julianknight.dev/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Julian-Knight-dev-website-OG-300×300.jpg” />

Best Practices

1. Use custom images that are unique to each article or post.
2. Whenever possible, use images you’ve created. If you can’t do that, ensure you have the correct permissions to use outside photos.
3. You can utilize your social media headshot or website logo if you need relevant images for your content.
4. Higher resolution is always better, but choose an image with detail you are prepared to sacrifice when seen shrunken and viewed on a mobile device. I recommend having one main item in a picture with much color and contrast.

og:title

This is the title of the article, blog post, or page you want to be shared on social media.

Syntax

<meta property=”og:title” content=”Open Graph Tags: Why they matter in personal branding” />

Best Practices

1. Focus on accuracy and value.
2. You can use the exact title of your article, post, or page – please don’t change or try to enhance it.
3. Keep them short to prevent overflow – a good rule of thumb is up to 60 characters and 40 or fewer works best on mobile.
4. Shorter titles also shorten the content’s URL, which, as you’ll see below, also improves shareability.

og:url

This is the URL of the article, blog post, or page you want to be shared on social media.

Syntax

<meta property=”og:url” content=”https://www.julianknight.dev/coaching/open-graph-tags-why-they-matter-in-personal-branding/” />

Best Practices

1. Use a canonical URL, which, per Google, is “the URL of the best representative page from a group of duplicate pages.”
2. Choose a URL structure that includes keywords from your title (see above).
3. Separate words with hyphens
4. Shorter and simpler is better.

og:type

This is the type of content you are sharing. For example, since this is a blog post

Syntax

<meta property=”og:type” content=”article” />

Best Practices

1. Keep it Simple – initially, use “article” for articles and blog posts. Use “website” for everything else.

In future posts, I’ll discuss some of the optional OG tags, but if you want to start getting more advanced by yourself, follow The Open Graph Protocol for the most up-to-date standards to follow.

Thanks for reading, and feel free to share!