It's obvious there's a lot going on in the web. But as websites, social media networks, search engines, apps and everything else continue to get more and more integrated your website needs to keep up.
It's important to know how these things connect. How does google arrive at the search term you click on? How does facebook know what description and image to pull when you share a link? How does Apple News know where to categorize your blog?
It all comes down to meta tags. Meta tags are information stored in your website's code that are not visible on your site but available to third parties referencing it.
These are are part of the hidden content of your website and are crucial to your digital marketing success. In this blog we will go through the three platforms and how they communicate with your site.
How Search Engines integrate with your site:
If you have done any web publishing you have heard the terms page titles, page description and keywords over and again. These are important and there are many different ways to implement them depending on what content management system you use. Most people however, don't know what they look like or how they work.
This is what they look like in the code:
The title page you see on the top is one of the most important pieces of information on your page. This is used as the text of your link in search engine results, the main title when you share a url on Facebook and the text that appears on the tab of your internet browser. It has huge implications for linking your site with keywords you want to be associated with.
The meta description below is also hugely important. It's what pulls the summary of your page to Google, and can also be the description for your page on social media sites. Having relevant keywords and good information in this meta tag is very important in marketing your digital content.
Both of these tags need to be rich in keywords that are also found in the public facing content. Having strong keywords that are not in your public content can actually hurt your search engine rankings.
How Social Media Sites and Apps integrate with your site:
Social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn use many of the same resources as search engines but they have some addtional tools. They utilize a set of meta tags called "Open Graph Protocol."
This gives social media services a ton of information including:
- What image to use
- A specific title for social media outlets
- The site's name
- What category it's in
- The specific url for this content to reference
- Who the author is
...and much, much more. This is a scalable platform with each service providing a list of og:tags that they can read and add to their database.
Conclusion:
Make sure you communicate with your developer about the platforms that you want to integrate your sites content with and make sure they understand the best practices to reach your goals. If you are wondering how your next site can make a statement all over the website, please make sure to contact us at Prime Incorporated.
