Open Graph is a weird name for something that – as far as I can work out – has nothing to do with graphs. For quite a while, I ignored it completely as I didn’t think it applied to what I did. Most of my blogs aren’t math orientated and I don’t display graphs.
It turns out that the name has nothing to do with that/
It’s Facebook’s terminology for how it defaults to displaying information about your page when someone likes it.
Hmmm. Time to investigate further!
As you may already know, there are a bunch of “tags” that help Google work out how to display information about your page in the search results.
These have been around as long as I can remember, so it beats me why Facebook didn’t just use those and add a few extra ones in for other information they’d like to have.
So I investigated a bit further and they do use things like meta description and page titles if they don’t have Open Graph data to work with – a big sigh of relief on my part when I found that out. It reduced the urgency on some of the sites I’ve got.
It also turns out that the Yoast SEO plugin that I use and recommend does most of the work for you.
You have to go into the Social tab and adjust a few settings.
The first thing to do is tick the box that says “Add Open Graph Meta Data”. That will take care of the basics of adding the required tags.
The next thing I did was add a default image URL – most of my posts don’t include images and if that’s the case then Facebook will guess what it should use.
Since computers are no good at guessing, that’s not a good idea.
Before I changed this, I checked a couple of posts in the Facebook debugger and if someone had an avatar, that was being used as it was the only image on the page.
So setting a default image is a very good idea.
Apparently Facebook recommend this has a minimum size of at least 600 pixels wide and 315 pixels tall and ideally – for the best chance of it being displayed when someone likes your page – 1200 pixels wide by 630 pixels tall.
If you don’t use an image that size, Facebook will either not show it or they will adjust it.
That means they could crop the image – cutting off the edges or the top and bottom – to fit their style.
Again, not something computers do particularly intelligently. So it’s better to get it right yourself.
Yoast has a “Social” tab below your posts.
You can use that to change the description it suggests to Facebook if you’d prefer it to use something other than the one you’ve crafted for Google on the General tab.
You can do the same again if you’d like a different description again on Google+.
But – probably more importantly – you can tell Yoast which image you want to display if someone Likes your page on Facebook.
It’s unlikely that your main image is the correct size for Facebook to display it nicely, so if you use images on your posts I’d strongly recommend that you take the small amount of extra time to do this.
The Twitter tab allows you to bring in your Twitter data.
The Google tab allows you to select the author for the main page of your site and also a link to your main Google+ profile.
Apart from setting an image for each post, most of the changes are one off and should help you get better results when people like your page, Tweet about it or do something with it on Google+.