E164 – Why Open Graph, Meta Descriptions and Other Tagging Matters

When is the last time you tested your various pages in Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Twitter or on any other social network?

Do you know how a product page, category page or blog page will display in various circumstances? What happens if you don't have an image for a service page or blog post? What about category pages where there is no default image declared in your CMS? What will that page look like when shared?

Here is the example the sent Dave down a rabbit hole and inspired this episode:

As you can see, Indeed.com and likely many other sites simply aren't setup to do well when shared on some social sites.

So take some time this week and use the tools listed below or your own tool of choice and test a few pages from each type (category, service, product, about, blog post, etc.) and see how your site does.

Be sure to look for pages without Meta Descriptions or that don't clearly have an image in the page - how do these display?

Open Graph Tools

iframely debugging toolOpen Graph CheckTwitter Card ValidatorFB Open Graph DebuggerOpen Graph Tester - site is not secure fyiOpen Graph CheckerSocial Media Optimizer (covers all in one place nicely)

Full Transcript

Matt Siltala: [00:00:00] Welcome to another exciting episode of the business of digital podcast, featuring your host, Matt  and Dave roar. Hey guys, excited to have you join us on another one of these business of digital podcast episodes. And today we're just going to jump right into it because we're hungry right now, right? Me

Dave Rohrer: [00:00:23] and I was already hungry.

Now I'm starving.

Matt Siltala: [00:00:25] Where should I have pictures of. Snippets of food and all kinds of stuff, but what are we talking about today? We are talking about why open graph meta-description and other things

Dave Rohrer: [00:00:37] matter. Okay. I know it's a working title is always, uh, yeah, another tagging matters. That was the, in a hurry, wrote that down,

Matt Siltala: [00:00:48] but that's all, but the point was we have a bunch of different tools that Dave was going to share with you.

I'm hearing a little while about, you know, testing out your sites and things like that, your socials. But I thought it [00:01:00] was interesting because, um, you know, I thought that I was given an example of one that wasn't doing necessarily a good job with some of that. And I shared it with you on Facebook and you're like, no, it comes up with this huge sandwich and I'm hungry now.

Dave Rohrer: [00:01:12] Yeah, well that was in messenger. Now, the first thing I'll do is if you're ever curious the quickest way. Um, and I've had, I've actually been forgotten to switch it back is take a link and post it on Facebook

Matt Siltala: [00:01:32] in the regular,

Dave Rohrer: [00:01:33] just in the regular thing. Alright. Don't hit post, but just see what comes

Matt Siltala: [00:01:38] up. So, cause I've done that before.

Dave Rohrer: [00:01:42] Sometimes even if you screw up open graph and you screw up everything, sometimes it will still. Grab something, but it also depends on the page. So we were talking about different examples in different businesses where one, they might care and two, they might not care [00:02:00] and restaurants, especially right now.

You know, if my wife was, we're not going out right now, we're going to order out. She would send me a link to somewhere new, like maybe a new restaurant just opened up or there was some special and she sent me a link. And it's in messenger or it's on Facebook or, you know, it's on Twitter or whatever. Um, what shows up

Matt Siltala: [00:02:21] and depending on what shows up could get you excited about if you liked that suggestion or not,

Dave Rohrer: [00:02:27] that's correct.

Or if you have a menu page or a blog post and say you don't have a default image or that the open graph is not set up correctly, or, you know, the Twitter cards aren't set up correctly. All of