Social Media Optimization For Dummies

Chapter 9

Implementing Social Media Standards and Protocols

In This Chapter

• Understanding the role of semantic markup
• Implementing Schema.org
• Applying Facebook's Open Graph Protocol
• Creating Twitter Cards and using Rich Pins for Pinterest

Have you ever shared something on Facebook and found that the share displays some bizarre image unrelated to the content or that the description looks like nonsense? Well, that's what can happen if the publisher hasn't implemented semantic markup for the content. It turns out that with just a little effort, publishers can affect what appears when people share their content. This chapter explains the markup that makes it possible to take control of what's shown when people share your content.

Semantic markup is just as much about search engine optimization (SEO) as it is about social media optimization (SMO). Although some purists may prefer to think of this topic as purely one for the SEO team, the simple fact of the matter is that implementing these markup standards not only positively affects SEO, but also delivers significant benefits on key social media channels, including Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, and Pinterest.

Introducing Semantic Markup

Simply put, semantic markup is a standardized way of writing code that makes a web page easily understandable by dumb machines, such as search engines. It's a way to annotate the content of a web page so that it can be understood properly by search engines (or by Facebook, Twitter, and other ...