OG Tags

What Are OG Tags?

When someone shares your page on Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter, OG tags determine which image, title, and description are shown. Without OG tags, social media platforms randomly select content — often with unsuitable images or truncated text. Correct OG tags significantly increase click-through rates on shared links.

OG tags (Open Graph tags) are HTML meta data that control how a web page is displayed on social networks like Facebook, LinkedIn, WhatsApp, or Twitter. When someone shares a link on social media, the platform reads the OG tags and shows not what Google sees, but what website owners have defined through the OG tags. These include the preview image (og:image), the title (og:title), the description (og:description), and the URL (og:url). Good OG tags are therefore essential for click-through rates when sharing on social media.

The mechanism is relatively simple: a social media platform sends a bot that crawls the web page and reads the OG tags. If no OG tags are present, the platform attempts to analyze the page itself and extract a title, description, and image — the result is often suboptimal. With correct OG tags, you guarantee that the page looks appealing when someone shares the link. The og:image should be at least 1200x630 pixels. The og:title and og:description should be optimized for social media and invite clicks (they can differ from the Meta Title and Description for Google).

In practice, OG tags should be systematically set for all important pages, especially landing pages, blog content, and product pages. This is quickly solved via CMS or Tag Manager. For blog posts, a different og:title than the page title is often recommended — one that stands out on social media and encourages clicks. The og:image should be high quality and on-brand. It’s worth regularly testing how the page looks on different social networks (e.g., with the Facebook Sharing Debugger). These often-overlooked meta tags can significantly increase a website’s social traffic.