Social Structured Data Is Your Friend: Alex Moss at #BrightonSEO
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Social Structured Data Is Your Friend: Alex Moss at #BrightonSEO

15th April 2013

BrightonSEO kicked off in style with its first session on ‘On-Site’ optimisation in the Corn Exchange. Alex Moss, Co-Founder and Technical Director at 3 Door Digital took us through his tips for using structured data for social media publication and distribution and why the effort of doing so could really pay off in terms of encouraging engagement and sharing.

Why Use Social Structured Data?

Alex gave some strong incentives as to why SEOs should be using these features:

  • It can improve your CTR
  • You can tailor content to each social network
  • Can give you extra exposure 

He walked us through the benefits for Google +, Facebook and Twitter.

alex moss brighton seo

 Photo Credit

Structured Data for Google +

Without structured data, Google + will pull through a snippet that it thinks is most appropriate for the post. If no Meta data has been confirmed, this can mean that only the title and the first 200 characters of content appear – which is fine if you are confident that those first characters represent your work but we know that this isn’t always the case. Using structured data, you can control the title, the description and even include a featured thumbnail. The more bespoke your snippet is, the higher the click through rate. Although the tags are still very new, there are four types to currently take into consideration:

  • Type
  • Title
  • Image
  • Description – up to 200 characters

Structured Data for Facebook

Tackling Facebook Open Graph is steep learning curve but there are benefits to optimising this feature as it again allows a more bespoke roll out of your content. Just like Google +, implementation of structured data will give you control over appearance and the tags cover:

  • URL
  • Title
  • Image –at least 200×200 px
  • Description – up to 200 characters
  • Site Name
  • Type

Structured Data for Twitter

Twitter Cards are very exciting and allow you to custom publish your content, depending on whether it’s an image, a video, a product etc. Current available tags include:

  • Site – twitter username of the website
  • Creator – twitter username of the author/owner of that page
  • Title
  • Image –at least 200×200 px
  • Description – up to 200 characters

There are currently 6 types of Twitter Card:

  • Summary Card: Default card, including a title, description, thumbnail, and Twitter account attribution.
  • Photo Card: A Tweet sized photo card.
  • Gallery Card: A Tweet card geared toward highlighting a collection of photos.
  • App Card: A Tweet card for providing a profile of an application.
  • Player Card: A Tweet sized video/audio/media player card.
  • Product Card: A Tweet card to better represent product content.

Alex has posted his slides online so please take a look and see how you can implement them for your social campaigns.

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Written By
Carla Marshall is Director of SEO at ReelSEO.com.
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