SEO Meta Tags and Microdata for Blogs

on Seo, Html5, Blogs, Microdata, Schema.org, Semantic

A quick summary of what your blog should include to optimize itself for search engines and social shared.

A quick, no explanation reference on how to optimize blog posts and blogs for search engines.

Meta Tags

Meta tags go in the <head> of an HTML document. They add additional information/context to the current web page or website.

  • OpenGraph: Facebook tags
  • Schema.org: Bing, Yahoo, Google, etc.
  • Twitter: … Twitter
<!-- Update your html tag to include the itemscope and itemtype attributes. -->
<html itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Article">

<!-- Place this data between the <head> tags of your website -->
<title>Page Title. Maximum length 60-70 characters</title>
<meta name="description" content="Page description. No longer than 155 characters." />

<!-- Schema.org markup for Google+ -->
<meta itemprop="name" content="The Name or Title Here" />
<meta itemprop="description" content="This is the page description" />
<meta itemprop="image" content="http://www.example.com/image.jpg" />

<!-- Twitter Card data -->
<meta name="twitter:card" content="summary_large_image" />
<meta name="twitter:site" content="@publisher_handle" />
<meta name="twitter:title" content="Page Title" />
<meta name="twitter:description" content="Page description less than 200 characters" />
<meta name="twitter:creator" content="@author_handle" />
<!-- Twitter summary card with large image must be at least 280x150px -->
<meta name="twitter:image:src" content="http://www.example.com/image.html" />

<!-- Open Graph data -->
<meta property="og:title" content="Title Here" />
<meta property="og:type" content="article" />
<meta property="og:url" content="http://www.example.com/" />
<!-- 1200 x 630 For optimal sharing -->
<meta property="og:image" content="http://example.com/image.jpg" />
<meta property="og:description" content="Description Here" />
<meta property="og:site_name" content="Site Name, i.e. Moz" />
<meta property="article:published_time" content="2013-09-17T05:59:00+01:00" />
<meta property="article:modified_time" content="2013-09-16T19:08:47+01:00" />
<meta property="article:section" content="Article Section" />
<meta property="article:tag" content="Article Tag" />
<meta property="fb:admins" content="Facebook numberic ID" />

HERE: As a GitHub Gist

If you want to see if you’ve set these correctly, you can check to see how each of the appropriate vendors reads your webpage.

  • OpenGraph Validator: HERE
  • Twitter Card Validator: HERE
  • Schema.org Validator: HERE

More Reading

  • OpenGraph Guide: HERE
  • Twitter Guide: Here
  • Schema.org Guide: Here

Semantic Markup

Does your websites HTML markup contain a large number of <div> elements?!?! Use HTML tags that are more semantic/descriptive of the content they contain! <div>s can be replaced with…

<article> <aside> <details> <figure> <figcaption> <footer> <header> <main> <nav> <section> <summary> <time>

Mostly self explanatory, but there are a couple rules to how these should be used. For some direction, try reading my more in-depth post on HTML5’s sectioning elements.

Other Stuff

  • Make it easy to share content
  • HAVE AMAZING CONTENT (and original)
  • alt tags for images
  • Sign up for Google’s webmaster tools
  • Make your website mobile friendly
  • Increase page load times
  • URLs should contain key words to content on page
  • Add SSL to your website

But most importantly.. Provide solid, original content, and a great user experience.

© 2019. All rights reserved.