Open Graph tags
Also called: og tags, open graph protocol, og meta tags
Open Graph tags are meta tags in a page's head that tell social and messaging platforms how to render a link when it is shared, setting the preview title, description, and image. They follow the Open Graph protocol format: <meta property="og:title" content="..." />.
Open Graph came out of Facebook in 2010 as an open protocol (documented at ogp.me). Four properties are marked required: og:title, og:type, og:image, and og:url (the canonical URL that acts as the object’s permanent ID in the graph). Most real pages also add og:description and og:site_name. Each is a plain <meta> tag in the <head>:
<meta property="og:title" content="On-Page SEO Guide" />
<meta property="og:image" content="https://example.com/og.jpg" />
<meta property="og:url" content="https://example.com/guide/" />The image does the heavy lifting
Facebook’s docs recommend an image at least 600px wide, and 1080px+ for high-resolution screens. The practitioner standard that renders cleanly across Facebook, X, LinkedIn, Slack, and iMessage is 1200x630 at a 1.91:1 ratio. Declaring og:image:width and og:image:height helps the preview load correctly the first time a page is shared.
Two things worth knowing. X/Twitter reads its own Twitter Card tags but falls back to Open Graph when they are missing, so one good OG set covers most platforms. And platforms cache previews aggressively, so after you edit tags you often need Facebook’s Sharing Debugger to force a re-scrape before the new card shows up.
How it affects your traffic
Open Graph tags control one thing: how your link looks the moment someone shares it in a post, a Slack channel, or a text message. A missing or wrong og:image means the link renders as plain text or a random scraped thumbnail, and people scroll past it. A clean card with the right headline and image earns the click. That matters most for pages people actually pass around (guides, case studies, launches), where social and referral traffic compounds over time. Setting OG tags correctly across a site, alongside title tags, meta descriptions, and schema, is part of our On-Page SEO work.
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