The Perfect Social Media Metadata For Wordpress - SEOmoz YouTube Contest Winner

Key Takeaways

hey everyone my name is Doug Thomas I'm a paid search specialist at search influence the largest internet marketing company on the Gulf Coast and today I'd like to talk to you about social metadata we're going to use WordPress because it's pretty easy to use and right now I'm taking my Twitter handle putting it in my profile under aim and my Google+ URL and putting it under website after saving we're going to go to this post and set up some custom Fields one's going to be viral title one's going to be viral desk and one's going to be OG image all with underscores now I'm going to open up my FTP program and open up header.php in the theme file and take a look at that first thing that we're going to do is we're going to add the non-standard prefix attribute to the HTML tag we're going to set up three things today what you need for opengraph the basic Twitter cards which are in beta and Google+ authorship opengraph uses metatags with a property attribute and we're going to set up OG site name using the PHP blog info name we're then going to tell Facebook what type of page it is by saying if it's a single blog post it's an article otherwise it's a website we're then going to tell Facebook where we're from by saying that we're from the US by using OG local now we really get to the meat of the open graph metadata by saying that if there's a custom field called viral title and it's set that's what's going to be used for the open graph title otherwise we'll just use whatever the title actually is the OG description is going to be the craziest code we're going to do today we're going to copy and paste the code from the content of the OG title replace viral title With viral desk and then if viral desk is not set what we're going to do is we're going to take 197 characters of the content without HTML tags add a dot dot dot and then we'll be done with that the last part of the open graph is to set the thumbnail image what we're going to do is we're going to copy and paste that same code from before and change viral title to OG image then we're going to hardcode a default image just in case that's not set put Twitter for metadata also uses the meta tag but uses the name attribute the first one is card and we're going to hardcode it to summary the next Twitter metadata is site and that's just hardcoded to whatever the site's Twitter handle is the last two lines of code for the Twitter Creator and the Google+ authorship use the same PHP what we do is pull from the author profile the Twitter from the aim field and the Google+ profile from the URL field the next step is to refresh the page to see if the theme works then check the page out in the Google Rich tester which will also pick up open graph data