Social media and SEO

Banter
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I’m wondering how much effort we should be making with Twitter card & Facebook Open Graph and whether it may be counterproductive for general SEO if done incorrectly. Does Google even care?

I am currently building a large new website that looks on target to reach 130+ pages. Each page will have a unique page title, description and structured data descriptions. The thought of also adding unique images and descriptions to each page for Twitter card and Facebook Open Graph is downright painful, but I understand this is seen as duplicate content if the same data is used on every page.

As an alternative, I’m thinking of just including unique social media data on the key pages and leaving the others blank. Does anybody have any insight or thoughts on the best way forward? I really want this site to do well, but it has to be said this is mind numbingly boring work with no guarantees it will make any difference one way or another.

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The reason for Facebook or Twitter links / cards is for users to share. If you have 130 pages on the website i’d ask myself - does the specific page have any content worth sharing? And, ergo, is the page likely to be shared? Otherwise the point of doing it is moot. Maybe your top level content or best sellers might be good for this but not all 130 pages, IMO

However there is also the belief that it contributes to SEO and Google takes that into consideration, but there’s no way of proving this.

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Hi Ashley

I too have a site with a similar number of pages.

It does indeed create additional work loads if you want social tagging to be effective and relevant.

I have spent countless hours on it - most of which was the learning curve.

Ultimately it depends on what your objectives are and how much value you place on being found.

Personally speaking I see no reason to spend hours upon hours building sites if at the end of the day you dont get site traffic.

If you want site traffic and you dont want to pay for site advertisements you will struggle to build the traffic you seek.

For my part the SEO and social tagging is just another core component of what we have to do when we build sites.

If you use workflow tools such as text expander you can eliminate a great deal of the repetition and honest typo mistakes.

Google increasingly expects and looks for this work to have been done.

I’d say consider it a ‘necessary evil’

Paul

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As @aidy said, the Twitter and FB tags have nothing to do with SEO but are there simply to improve the look of your site when someone posts a link to it in T or FB
Sites like LinkedIn and Slack make use of the same info when you post a link to them too.

This site is useful to test how your site/page will look when its link is posted: https://social.pilcro.com/

I’ve got a TotalCMS gallery of images from which I pull a random one each time a link is posted, try pasting the url below into it several times and you ‘should’ see one of several possible images.

RW4ALL may make use of them too so when I paste the link it may appear as just a https://… or as something a little more presentable:

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Well then, there you go, all I posted was
https://www.scale-ni.com/
and either the Foundation SEO Twitter or FB cards did the rest.

Here’s what happens when I post a url link to the DMA site (https://www.dma-ni.com/):

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Realistically there is no way I expect people to be madly sharing all 130 pages on social media. It’s just not going to happen and I know I won’t be pushing all of them either, so it may just be best to concentrate here on the more important pages, which is probably half that number at best.

I completely agree with @paul.rowe that there is no point building a big website unless it has really effective SEO that will appear high in the rankings and generate a lot of traffic, so this does all feel like a necessary evil. For a while I had the same basic structured data on every page but now realise that has to change, which made me think about these other bits as well.

While going through this earlier I discovered something called PageMaps that I had never heard of before. https://developers.google.com/custom-search/docs/structured_data. It looks like a structured data format and they suggest adding it to the sitemap.

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I’m sure that app developers are missing an opportunity here to create a stack or stacks to better target these very important tagging issues.

The @joeworkman SEO Helper and Structured Data stacks are great and do the job as intended. However I am sure they could be updated and improved upon to fully engage with all the other Google tagging.

I think also that further tutorials would be extremely welcome to explain how best to use the Structured Data stack in particular as (for me at least and I suspect the vast majority) the subjects of ARIA & Schema gets very confusing - any chance of such a tutorial @joeworkman ?

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Joe has a new standalone version of SEO Helper coming out as his next release, it’s a big improvement on the one built into Foundation v1 and will work on any setup (theme/UIKit/Foundation etc)

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I’d heard about that, but no specific details on how it will be different from the current version.

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More depth to the current settings, more settings and freed from Foundation plus other stuff.
I’m sure there’ll be a bunch of videos to cover the lot, you may want to prompt him on WS with a list of the things you’d like covered.

I don’t use schema or aria but when it’s been discussed in the hangout I believe that those that have implemented it have seen no tangible benefits in search results/traffic.

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Here is a glimpse at the new SEO Helper 2.

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CleanShot 2019-04-27 at 07.05.32.jpg405×512 59.5 KB

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Will this work with Foundry as well?

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All of my stacks outside of Foundation should work in any theme.

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A definite step in the right direct @joeworkman

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Yes agreed with all - I would only add individual Social tags to the marketing pages. The rest I would use one SEO helper stack in a partial or whatever. But although social media does not effect SEO directly - I really believe it does indirectly… If you have a great image, header, description (using Open Graph and shared on FB for example) then people are going to click on it to visit the website… from here on in Google is watching… bounce rate, time on site, time on the page, pogo’ing, sharing, clicks…