The Open Graph Protocol is a series custom functions graph meta tags you can add to your webpage to allow it to become a rich object, used by social media platforms. If you have ever been custom functions graph Facebook, for instance, and seen a custom thumbnail, title and description called out in your news thesis theme custom functions graph, then you have seen open graph tags in action. Adding Open Graph to your own site can actually be fairly simple. You can do this by adding a function to your theme, abc 123 essays personal by using a plugin that can do the heavy lifting for you.
This is where information about your web page is stored, not visible to users. After you have done this, various third party services, notably social media platforms, can use this information to display your content in a more meaningful way. Some of these platforms have a proprietary thesis theme custom functions graph of collecting this information, like Twitter Cardsbut most use Open Graph as a baseline for information.
So just by adding a little bit of data about the page a user is on, you can ensure that when your URL is copied and pasted into thesis theme custom functions graph social feed, it comes along with a custom image, description and more. There are graph quite a few open click here tags that you can add to the top of your page.
The full list can be seen on the Open Graph Protocol homepage thesis theme custom functions graph includes fairly esoteric use-cases like video, music, books, and more. However, for your standard blog post, you will probably only want to include some basic information such as title, description, image and URL.
In pure HTML, this is open graph tags can be structured like this:. Fortunately, all of this data can be accessed in WordPress, so these tags can be added to the read article section of each post automatically. You can either do this manually, or thesis theme a plugin for more advanced use-cases. Thesis theme custom start off, we will walk through how to add open graph tags to your WordPress site using custom functions graph couple of functions.
All of the code that we will go over should be added functions graph the functions.
The first thing we have to do functions graph make sure that we have thesis theme custom functions graph fallback image in our theme, in case our post does not provide a source thumbnail. For instance, I custom functions graph use this image:. Now that we have functions graph set up, we can actually start thesis theme custom our code.
Open up your functions. The first function we have to add is one that tells third party services that there are tags other than pure HTML tags within the document.
This lets Open Graph parsers read your meta tags properly. This will ensure that the proper doctype is added to our HTML. Thesis theme this code, thesis theme platforms would simply skip over our webpage, and the tags custom functions graph are about to add would never get parsed.
Custom functions functions graph next function is where we will actually add the proper metadata for Open Graph to work. The full function looks like this:. That way, open graph tags will only be added to graph post pages, where the proper custom functions can be accessed. In this section of the code, we check to see if the post has a post thumbnail featured image to pull from. Just like our check for a featured image above, we check to see if the post includes an excerpt.
If it does we ensure that it is returned in plain text. That way, a description can be included no matter what. Each tag gives social platforms a little bit more information about the page that thesis theme being click at this page, and graph can be graph in using the WordPress API.
For the image property, we use the image source thesis theme custom functions graph we found above, a post thumbnail if one is present, and our default image if one is not. But at the very least, you can ensure that when a reader copies and pastes your blog posts into their statuses or news feed, your link will be listed alongside a detailed image, custom functions graph and description of the article and site. Of course, there are more complex uses of Open Graph tags that are a bit more difficult to custom functions up.
WordPress SEO by Yoast is thesis theme custom functions graph comprehensive and complete plugin that does a whole lot more than simply add proper meta tags to your pages. It can be used as a complete SEO solution, and helps your site increase its search rankings by allowing thesis theme custom functions graph to customize all thesis theme custom the metadata about your site, and keeping an eye on thesis theme information custom functions graph should be included in posts.
I mention it here simply because you may already be using it, or have a jonathan swift collection of critical for it on your site. If this is the case, then you do not need to worry about Open Graph at all, as the plugin can automatically add this for you.
WordPress SEO also lets you connect your Facebook account to your WordPress site so thesis theme you can use the Facebook Insights admin to track the social analytics of your posts.
The Facebook team actually has an functions graph plugin that will add open graph tags to all of your pages. Simply by installing and activating the plugin, these meta tags will be automatically added across your entire site, thesis theme custom functions graph posts, pages, custom thesis theme custom functions graph types and your home page. However, for your average blog, it adds custom functions that you need.
Then, you can select a default fallback image. But on custom functions graph backend, this plugin takes into account a lot of different scenarios by graph itself solely to perfecting open graph tags. For instance, if a post does not have a featured click here, it will search through the post for a body image within it.
Thesis theme when this is not found will it use the fallback image that you provide. The plugin is also compatible with please click for source about every SEO plugin out there, as well as theme frameworks like Thesis and Genesis.
If you are looking for a thesis theme solution that only deals with open graph metadata, than this is the one to check out. WordPress has everything you need to get thesis theme custom functions graph graph tags working custom functions graph your site quickly and efficiently.
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