Promoting your site and integrating your content against social networks can be hard because everyone has different best-practices and requirements.
At a bare minimum, your pages should contain this metadata:
| canonical url |
<link rel="canonical" href="http://example.com/blog" />
The canonical url is used to represent a "unique" "master version" of a web page to filter out duplicate content. This allows you to transfer the search engine equity and object graph placement of one URL onto another. Examples: your `mobile` specialized item page will list the normal item page as the canonical; a URL with lots of querystrings like timestamps and session ids will omit them. |
| title |
<link name="title" content="My title" />
The title appears on search engines; several social networks may use it as a default title for social representation as well. |
| description |
<link name="description" content="My Description" />
The description appears on search engines; several social networks may use it as a default description for social representation as well. |
| keywords |
<link name="keywords" content="Example Keywords, Best-Practices" />
Search engines may use keywords when indexing your website. Be careful not to "overstuff" or use non-relevant concepts, because you will be penalized. |
"Like" buttons for your brand should point to the URL of your Facebook profile, not your web page. This will ensure you have more "likes", because they won't be split between your website and the Facebook page representing it (the facebook page is promoted within Facebook via the newsfeed and other social sharing).
Facebook "Like Button" documentation - https://developers.facebook.com/docs/plugins/like-button
Facebook uses an extension of the OpenGraph protocol to markup pages.
There is more info on their "Sharing Guide for Webmasters" https://developers.facebook.com/docs/sharing/webmasters#markup
| required | og:url |
The canonical url for the page. You should also duplicate this in a `canonical` tag on metadata. |
| required | og:site_name |
The name of your website or brand. |
| required | og:title |
The title of the article or web page for Facebook. This should not contain your brand name, which should be placed in `og:site_name` |
| required | og:image |
The url for the image. The image should be in line with the Facebook Content Sizes above. `og:image` can also be a namespace that specifies the width, height, https url and image type. See Facebook's developer docs for more info https://developers.facebook.com/docs/sharing/webmasters#images |
| recommended | fb:app_id |
This will enable domain insights. |
| optional | og:type |
The type of media. A full listing is available at https://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/opengraph#object-type |
| optional | og:locale |
The locale. Defaults to `en_US`. |
| optional | og:video |
The URL for a video, or a namespace of video data. |
Twitter "Follow" button documentation - https://dev.twitter.com/web/follow-button
Twitter uses their own 'cards' extension to metadata. You can learn more about cards here: https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/tweets/optimize-with-cards/guides/getting-started