Defining Open Graph Properties to Improve SEO

Most within digital marketing understand titles & meta descriptions for SEO purposes.

Less understood is the Open Graph Protocol. Originally designed at Facebook, think of OGP as metadata for social platforms instead of search engines. OGP allows better summaries of a webpage to be shared across FB, Twitter, LinkedIn, & Pinterest.

While this may seem irrelevant to SEO, anything that improves your clickthrough rates on social will attract more engagement & links, improving your content’s reach. (SEO getting involved yet again muhahaha!)

OG properties should also be different than conventional metadata. The OG description, for instance, can be much longer or shorter on certain social platforms versus meta descriptions for search engines. You can use Facebook Object Debugger to test & optimize Open Graph data.

If you have a WP site, with the Yoast SEO plugin installed, OG properties are handled fairly well after this feature is enabled. However, the big mistake I see elsewhere is to define the same OG properties for all pages. A web dev should instead have these pulled uniquely from each page.

Never miss a useful SEO insight.