[Dana Lookadoo] So what I'm going to talk today about is how to rock your SEO 0:00 with structured social sharing. 0:03 And it looks really great on screen as structured social sharing, 0:05 but say it 3 times fast. 0:09 Essentially what I'm going to talk about is using microdata 0:11 to mark up your pages so that they're optimized for social, 0:15 and we're going to go through a process of that. 0:19 Let's start talking about looking at unstructured snippets 0:22 on Google+ and Facebook. 0:26 What we have here is a post that Rand put together about doing presentations 0:29 and how not to kill kittens. 0:34 On this post what we see is that Google didn't find an image on the page 0:37 that was large enough to show, and Facebook chose his avatar. 0:42 So this unstructured formula, I call it killing puppies. 0:47 Let's look at how you can know if you want to do a preview 0:52 and see if your pages are actually ready for markup. 0:56 So what we have—Erica did a post on the 4 of our—the Moz community speakers. 1:00 Here I was looking—okay—what happened was Google chose Erica's avatar, 1:07 and Facebook found an image on the page. 1:12 This is what you don't want to do. You don't want to leave it up to them. 1:17 You actually want to take control yourself. Let's talk about that—if I'm to take control. 1:21 So how are you going to get this so you've got— 1:28 your optimized for Google, Facebook, and Twitter? 1:30 All right. So we have things we're going to move through real fast. 1:32 We have the anatomy of a share snippet. 1:35 So we've got to break it down before we go into the process. 1:37 And you have your share blurb which is your standard blurb of 1:40 what is this page all about—my greatest post. 1:43 You have your title which is also the anchor link to your URL. 1:46 And you have your description which tells about it, 1:51 as well as you have a thumbnail image. 1:54 So we've already seen how it looks without that. 1:56 I'm going to show you how to do this in an all-in-one formula. 2:01 I'm calling this a structured social sharing formula. 2:04 Essentially these are 10 best practices for what you can do to optimize these shares, 2:08 and I'm going to talk about using microdata and how to also use UTM tracking variables 2:14 so that you can track this and get social referral data for analytics. 2:21 Okay, let's move into the formula. 2:26 We have 10 steps, and I'm going to go through each of these 10 steps individually. 2:28 Five of the ten steps involve putting meta in the head. 2:34 Let's actually just go ahead and start with that. 2:39 We have the title is the first 4 of the 5 Open Graph tags, 2:42 which is—that's what we're using—we're using Open Graph. 2:47 Before I go on about that with the title, you don't have to use schema in doing this 2:50 because Facebook and Google+ will honor the Open Graph. 2:56 So we've got our title, and so we have "og:title" and what is it going to be? 3:01 In testing this it looks like Google+ is taking about 134 characters. 3:09 I think that's a little bit long, so just think about best practices for a title tag. 3:14 I'm recommending around 80. 3:18 You're not limited to the 60 that would be best practices for your meta title. 3:20 And you have your description. This is not required. 3:24 If you do not put in a description, however, they're going to pull it from the page. 3:29 So it's better that you set the directive yourself. 3:34 What I've been doing in the testing is I'm looking at about 188 characters 3:38 before that gets cut off. 3:41 Well last week I saw 453 characters in the description. 3:43 I can't tell you why. I don't know if I was part of the Google test set. 3:49 They're changing it, so—you know how Google works. 3:52 So I'm recommending around 188. 3:57 You could actually copy this from your meta description tag, 3:59 but you have a little bit more room for sure. 4:04 Okay, so now we're looking at the—good, I was wondering if the numbers were showing— 4:07 of your image. 4:13 The thumbnail image is one that's important because it's the image that shows 4:15 you have control over this. 4:18 Google likes a square image, so you want to be looking at 150 x 150 pixels. 4:20 You could do 120, but just keep in mind that you want to keep that square— 4:26 you don't want it to be too small. 4:31 Here's the interesting thing about the image is if you do not have the right size image, 4:34 then what you're seeing here is an example of Deborah Mestaller 4:42 and a picture of her where the open graph code is on the page, 4:46 and she is—Facebook is honoring that directive. 4:51 What's Google doing? You don't see Deborah's image over on Google. 4:56 They found some other image on the page. 5:00 So this happens—I actually just tapped webmaster radio SEO podcast 5:02 right before this and Ross Dunn was saying, "Yeah, we had the same thing happen 5:07 with our SEO social-media tip site that was actually pulling the Knowem graphic." 5:10 So it's going to pull your badges, so you really need to set this. Google will ignore that. 5:16 Okay. The next one is your object types. So what type of page are you sharing? 5:22 It's a required tag, but if you don't put it in by default, they're going to assume 5:28 that it's a website. 5:34 But what's interesting is you can actually look at your types, and you have other types— 5:36 article profile, book, movie, video, song. 5:40 You can learn more at ogp.me/#types, and you can delve into that a little bit more. 5:44 Okay, our last structured markup here is going to be the URL. 5:50 This is required and it's very simple. All you need to do is put in your canonical URL. 5:56 Okay, so we're done with Open Graph. That was pretty simple, right? 6:01 Next thing is you want to make sure that you're doing tracking with analytics. 6:06 So you want to use your UTM variables. 6:09 And on here—any of our analytics people see there's a mistake in this slide? 6:12 I'm actually missing an ampersand right before the medium. 6:21 It's actually fixed in the download of the presentation. 6:25 So let's go through this. You're going to do your URL, question mark, 6:27 and you're going to put UTM source—that's your source. 6:30 And here you're going to have your medium. Well how are you sharing it? 6:33 That's your medium, and that's social. 6:36 Then what is your campaign? 6:38 You don't have to put all 5 tags. So this works for you. 6:40 I'm going to show you how to do this a little bit more later. 6:44 It's very important that you put this in there because if you don't put your tags, 6:48 you're not going to get your social referral data. 6:50 And keep in mind if you're sharing on TweetDeck for instance, 6:53 you're not actually getting—you're not going to find out this information 6:57 because Twitter Web is going to send that, 7:00 but it's not going to tell you that it came from Twitter. 7:02 So this is pretty important for your overall tracking. 7:04 Okay, so we've got the basics taken care of. Now what? 7:07 Now we want to talk about the share content. 7:11 So when you look at actually what you're sharing, and you're filling in the 7:13 "what's new?" or "what's on your mind?" box, that's real simple. 7:18 Great. "Oh, this is my latest post—" but is that really what you want to be saying? 7:22 As we actually saw yesterday, AJ Kohn showed us how important 7:26 that these pages are that they're actually showing up within the search results. 7:29 So your blurb of what you say actually becomes the title tag of that page. 7:34 Do we want to thing front-loaded key words? 7:41 You don't want it to be spammy because we're thinking about engagement most of all. 7:43 So keep that in mind. 7:48 Okay, now we want to talk about hashtags. 7:50 When you're on Google+ if you type in #, it has an autocomplete, 7:53 you start typing your letters—you're going to get suggested hashtags. 7:57 Hashtags for Facebook—don't do it? Facebook is not Twitter. 8:02 There are ways to use them properly for business pages, but that's not for now. 8:07 Hashtags for Twitter—you can actually use tagdef and that will an autocomplete— 8:12 just don't overuse them. 8:17 Let's talk about optimal Tweets. 8:19 You want to append your UTM tracking variable to the end of your Tweet. 8:21 Then you want to make sure you copy and put that into bit.ly or your custom short URL. 8:26 And you've got a single hashtag, if any. 8:30 Then you've got to create a retweetable Tweet. 8:32 You want to make sure that it's not too long. 8:36 So we're looking about about 140 minus 5, which gives you enough characters 8:38 for the retweeting minus the length of your profile. 8:43 Here's an example of good format. 8:47 Okay. So now what? Our last thing is we have a worksheet. 8:49 You want to track everything. This worksheet is available for download. 8:53 You can get this off the slides later. 8:57 The worksheet will actually run through the—we have some conditional rules set up, 9:00 so it'll actually warn you if your tags are too short. 9:05 So this is just starting out with your meta and your standard description. 9:08 Now here you can put in here your planning of your Open Graph tags. 9:13 So this is set up for you for that and shows you which ones are required. 9:17 We have your campaign variables that you can put in your source, your medium, 9:23 and your name. 9:26 And guess what? The worksheet automatically tags your URLs. 9:28 So it's a URL builder as well. Okay, you've got all that. 9:31 All you have to do is now you're going to plan your social shares, 9:35 plan the length of how long your share is—especially for Twitter—and that's it. 9:37 All you have to do is cut and paste and let Google+ and Facebook 9:43 pull the elements from the page, and you're going to track your analytics. 9:47 And we're done. [applause] 9:50 I want to—wait, wait, wait—one more thing—one more thing. 9:52 That was done with the steps. I want to leave you with this. 9:56 You have no second chance to make a good first impression. 9:59 Okay. [applause] Thank you. 10:03 [female speaker] Thank you, Dana. 10:09 [Dana] I'm going to say one more thing. 10:11 There is a slide—I think I just clicked through it—there is a slide for resources so I have— 10:13 oh, whoever did that, thank you. That was like magic. 10:17 [female speaker] It was those magical guys back there. 10:19 [Dana] Yeah, so there are some resources with the link to the presentation, 10:21 as well as for you to download the spread sheet. 10:24 And it's free Creative Commons if you want to—links, that works out great. 10:27 [female speaker] I love all the free stuff. [laughs] 10:32 [Dana] Yeah, lots of free stuff here. 10:34 [female speaker] All right, we have a few minutes for questions. Who wants to go first? 10:36 [Dana] Okay. That's easy. How many of you are using Open Graph? Excellent. 10:43 [female speaker] Wow, I'd expect more hands. 10:50 [Dana] Yeah, yeah. That's good. We have one. 10:52 [female speaker] We got one. 10:58 [female audience member] So I have a question for you. >>[Dana] Okay. 11:00 [female audience member] Are there any good WordPress plugins 11:03 to do this automatically? 11:05 [Dana] Yeah. Actually, Yoast—Joost de Valk has a WordPress plugin, 11:07 and that's listed in the resources. 11:11 Good question. I'm glad you asked that. 11:13 Joost de Valk has his plugin and then there is another WordPress plugin called Like, 11:15 and those are listed on the resource page. 11:20 All right. 11:26 [female speaker] All right. Thank you. [applause] 11:28