Special Header Tags to Inform Facebook's Spiders

Facebook and Twitter, and perhaps other social media sites, developed special header tags they look for when a web page URL is published. The header tags are in the head area of a web page. They tell the social media site's spider what image and text to use when the link is published.

Here, I will talk about some of Facebook's special header tags, called Open Graph tags.

Facebook's spider can be told what title to use for the URL, what description to use and, if an image is available, what image to use. Without the special header tags, the spider looks around and tries to find appropriate information to publish with the link.

The Facebook developer's page talks about other header tags that can be used, but we'll talk only about three of them. The property attributes of the special header tags begin with og: and continue with names that identify what type of information the tag contains. The three names applicable to this write-up are og:image, og:title, and og:description.

The information the tag provides is in the content attribute.

Here is an example of each of the three:

<meta property="og:image" content="https://example.com/article-image.jpg">
<meta property="og:title" content="Reasons for Using a Header Tag Like This">
<meta property="og:description" content="How much do the special header tags help?">

To implement this, update the value of the content attributes as appropriate. Put the tags into the head area of the web page they apply to. It is okay to omit a tag if you don't have information for it.

Most of the willmaster.com web pages contain the special title and description tags for Facebook. There generally is no image for an article, so Facebook has to get along without one.

(This content first appeared in Possibilities newsletter.)

Will Bontrager