The Open Graph makes it easy for social networks to recognize your content. It enables you to integrate your web pages into the social graph, and connect user activity on your site, with user activity on social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus.
By adding the Open Graph metadata to your website, your pages show up richly across social sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus in user profiles, search results and in News Feed. The Open Graph tags also allow you to control your brand message throughout the social web. In addition, social shares from your site send signals to search engines, connecting shared links from your site.
Why Is This Important?
Open Graph gives website owners full control to any of their webpages, and lets you decide what information users will share across Facebook from your site. Rather than ‘Liking’ a page and leaving it to Facebook to decide what information to display, the open graph gives you the power to control how your content is shared by your users.
Each part of the snippet posted to Facebook, correlates with the Open Graph tags on your site. When pages are not tagged properly, Facebook algorithmically has to determine from other meta information on the page what to display, which can lead to a poor display of the information and lower overall engagement. This also happens with search engines in organic results. If you don’t give search and social media the signals they need, they will decide for you, which can also lead to a poor user experience and lower engagement.
How To Add Open Graph Meta To Your Site
Adding Open Graph Meta to Your WordPress site is easy with the WP SEO Plugin. Once the plugin is installed, simply select the “Add OpenGraph meta data” and “Add Twitter card meta data.” You can also add optional images and descriptions to control what gets displayed when people share your post. This can also be changed on a per page basis.
