Rock Your SEO with Structured Social Sharing – #MozCon Presentation

During my MozCon 2012 talk, attendees learned about the Structured Social Sharing Formula (SSSF) – 10 steps to optimize and track social share snippets on Facebook, Google Plus, and Twitter. The formula includes use of microdata and best practices for controlling the snippet that displays on Facebook and Google+ as well as how to automatically tag URLs with campaign variables for analytics.

PRO TIP: This structured markup makes a difference for SEO!

I’m sharing the process, my MozCon presentation, and a free worksheet with you below. Oh! La! La!

You can also view my Whiteboard Friday on SSSF where I give a bird’s-eye view of through the process.

Why are social snippets important?

You put your heart and soul into creating a piece of great content or a killer blog post. It looks good, reads well, is attractive, and maybe even authoritative. You’re hoping for links and social engagement. Then you share it online… OUCH! The wrong image displays, or worse, maybe no image displays. Your share doesn’t look as good as you hoped and fizzles.

If you don’t optimize your page with the right code, your dreams of going viral may flop. That killer content most likely won’t get as many reshares, likes, or retweets as you thought it would.

Example: Great content without structured markup

Rand Fishkin put together an absolutely stellar Whiteboard Friday: 8 Rules for Exceptional Slide Presentations

The video rocked! He included a SlideShare presentation along with transcripts. There were some fantastic images in the presntation and nice visuals in Rand’s video.

However, when shared on Facebook and Google+, the share snippet image didn’t work in both cases:

Facebook grabbed Rand’s avatar for the post image correctly, but Google+ found no image on the page large enough to pull.

Publishers beware: Most CMS are not set up to allow an editor to control the where the structured markup to control a share snippet needs to be placed. (There are a couple references below for WordPress users.) Amazingly, major news publishers such as the Reuters and the LA Times don’t even have it right. Often, a sponsor’s ad on the page is the default image that displays. OOPS!

Anatomy of a Share Snippet

Let’s review the elements of a share snippet before we get to the SSSF and steps. Every share snippet contains, at least, the following elements:

The code on your page controls how the share snippet displays:

1. Share Blurb – your explanation about the content.
2. Title – page Title
3. Description – brief description of the page
4. Image – a thumbnail image
5. URL – links the Title to the page

When you don’t use microdata to specify what to display for these elements, Facebook and Google+ determine it for you. You can make your social snippets look good and know if your social media engagement is working for you by implementing the steps below!

Formula for Optimized Social Engagement

Here’s the all-in-one Structured Social Sharing Formula to optimize your social engagement:

Five of the 10 steps include placing additional in the of each Web page using Open Graph Protocol (OG).

PRO TIP:
You don’t have to create two sets of tags – Open Graph and Schema.org. OG works for both Google and Facebook for social sharing! (Save Schema for other microdata markup.)

10 Steps With Microdata & Analytics

Four of the five Open Graph tags are required, marked with an asterisk (*) below. Let’s break each step down:

1. OG: Title*
   OG: Description
   OG: Image*
   
   ” />
   Enter the URL of the thumbnail image. If you don’t have an image, Facebook and Google+ will look for another image on your page, e.g. avatars, images for related posts, and worst of all…sponsored ad graphics.

   150×150 square is the best size for both Facebook and Google+. The height must be at least 120px. (If the width is less than 100px, then the aspect ratio must be no greater than 3:1.)

   Important: Size overrides code. Images that are too small or not square enough are not included in a Google+ snippet, even if the images are explicitly referenced by schema.org microdata or Open Graph markup.

2. OG: Type*
   Open Graph Object Types.

3. OG: URL*
   http://www.domain.com/file-name” />
   Put in your canonical URL. Simple (period).

   OK! We’re now done with the markup…

4. UTM Variables
   Append tracking tags to end of your URL:
   ?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=conference

   URL tagging with UTM campaign variables gives you social referral data!

   All you need to do is identify your URL and the three required attributes: the source (social network), the medium (how it is delivered), and the campaign (the category for how you want to track in Google Analytics).

5. Share Content
   This is the textual blurb you want to put in the share box.
   Enter it in the boxes where it says, “Share what’s new” (Facebook) or “What’s on your mind?” (Google+).

   SEO tip: this share text become the title tag