[Dana Lookadoo] So what I'm going to talk today about is how to rock your SEO

with structured social sharing.

And it looks really great on screen as structured social sharing,

but say it 3 times fast.

Essentially what I'm going to talk about is using microdata

to mark up your pages so that they're optimized for social,

and we're going to go through a process of that.

Let's start talking about looking at unstructured snippets

on Google+ and Facebook.

What we have here is a post that Rand put together about doing presentations

and how not to kill kittens.

On this post what we see is that Google didn't find an image on the page

that was large enough to show, and Facebook chose his avatar.

So this unstructured formula, I call it killing puppies.

Let's look at how you can know if you want to do a preview

and see if your pages are actually ready for markup.

So what we have—Erica did a post on the 4 of our—the Moz community speakers.

Here I was looking—okay—what happened was Google chose Erica's avatar,

and Facebook found an image on the page.

This is what you don't want to do. You don't want to leave it up to them.

You actually want to take control yourself. Let's talk about that—if I'm to take control.

So how are you going to get this so you've got—

your optimized for Google, Facebook, and Twitter?

All right. So we have things we're going to move through real fast.

We have the anatomy of a share snippet.

So we've got to break it down before we go into the process.

And you have your share blurb which is your standard blurb of

what is this page all about—my greatest post.

You have your title which is also the anchor link to your URL.

And you have your description which tells about it,

as well as you have a thumbnail image.

So we've already seen how it looks without that.

I'm going to show you how to do this in an all-in-one formula.

I'm calling this a structured social sharing formula.

Essentially these are 10 best practices for what you can do to optimize these shares,

and I'm going to talk about using microdata and how to also use UTM tracking variables

so that you can track this and get social referral data for analytics.

Okay, let's move into the formula.

We have 10 steps, and I'm going to go through each of these 10 steps individually.

Five of the ten steps involve putting meta in the head.

Let's actually just go ahead and start with that.

We have the title is the first 4 of the 5 Open Graph tags,

which is—that's what we're using—we're using Open Graph.

Before I go on about that with the title, you don't have to use schema in doing this

because Facebook and Google+ will honor the Open Graph.

So we've got our title, and so we have "og:title" and what is it going to be?

In testing this it looks like Google+ is taking about 134 characters.

I think that's a little bit long, so just think about best practices for a title tag.

I'm recommending around 80.

You're not limited to the 60 that would be best practices for your meta title.

And you have your description. This is not required.

If you do not put in a description, however, they're going to pull it from the page.

So it's better that you set the directive yourself.

What I've been doing in the testing is I'm looking at about 188 characters

before that gets cut off.

Well last week I saw 453 characters in the description.

I can't tell you why. I don't know if I was part of the Google test set.

They're changing it, so—you know how Google works.

So I'm recommending around 188.

You could actually copy this from your meta description tag,

but you have a little bit more room for sure.

Okay, so now we're looking at the—good, I was wondering if the numbers were showing—

of your image.

The thumbnail image is one that's important because it's the image that shows

you have control over this.

Google likes a square image, so you want to be looking at 150 x 150 pixels.

You could do 120, but just keep in mind that you want to keep that square—

you don't want it to be too small.

Here's the interesting thing about the image is if you do not have the right size image,

then what you're seeing here is an example of Deborah Mestaller

and a picture of her where the open graph code is on the page,

and she is—Facebook is honoring that directive.

What's Google doing? You don't see Deborah's image over on Google.

They found some other image on the page.

So this happens—I actually just tapped webmaster radio SEO podcast

right before this and Ross Dunn was saying, "Yeah, we had the same thing happen

with our SEO social-media tip site that was actually pulling the Knowem graphic."

So it's going to pull your badges, so you really need to set this. Google will ignore that.

Okay. The next one is your object types. So what type of page are you sharing?

It's a required tag, but if you don't put it in by default, they're going to assume

that it's a website.

But what's interesting is you can actually look at your types, and you have other types—

article profile, book, movie, video, song.

You can learn more at ogp.me/#types, and you can delve into that a little bit more.

Okay, our last structured markup here is going to be the URL.

This is required and it's very simple. All you need to do is put in your canonical URL.

Okay, so we're done with Open Graph. That was pretty simple, right?

Next thing is you want to make sure that you're doing tracking with analytics.

So you want to use your UTM variables.

And on here—any of our analytics people see there's a mistake in this slide?

I'm actually missing an ampersand right before the medium.

It's actually fixed in the download of the presentation.

So let's go through this. You're going to do your URL, question mark,

and you're going to put UTM source—that's your source.

And here you're going to have your medium. Well how are you sharing it?

That's your medium, and that's social.

Then what is your campaign?

You don't have to put all 5 tags. So this works for you.

I'm going to show you how to do this a little bit more later.

It's very important that you put this in there because if you don't put your tags,

you're not going to get your social referral data.

And keep in mind if you're sharing on TweetDeck for instance,

you're not actually getting—you're not going to find out this information

because Twitter Web is going to send that,

but it's not going to tell you that it came from Twitter.

So this is pretty important for your overall tracking.

Okay, so we've got the basics taken care of. Now what?

Now we want to talk about the share content.

So when you look at actually what you're sharing, and you're filling in the

"what's new?" or "what's on your mind?" box, that's real simple.

Great. "Oh, this is my latest post—" but is that really what you want to be saying?

As we actually saw yesterday, AJ Kohn showed us how important

that these pages are that they're actually showing up within the search results.

So your blurb of what you say actually becomes the title tag of that page.

Do we want to thing front-loaded key words?

You don't want it to be spammy because we're thinking about engagement most of all.

So keep that in mind.

Okay, now we want to talk about hashtags.

When you're on Google+ if you type in #, it has an autocomplete,

you start typing your letters—you're going to get suggested hashtags.

Hashtags for Facebook—don't do it? Facebook is not Twitter.

There are ways to use them properly for business pages, but that's not for now.

Hashtags for Twitter—you can actually use tagdef and that will an autocomplete—

just don't overuse them.

Let's talk about optimal Tweets.

You want to append your UTM tracking variable to the end of your Tweet.

Then you want to make sure you copy and put that into bit.ly or your custom short URL.

And you've got a single hashtag, if any.

Then you've got to create a retweetable Tweet.

You want to make sure that it's not too long.

So we're looking about about 140 minus 5, which gives you enough characters

for the retweeting minus the length of your profile.

Here's an example of good format.

Okay. So now what? Our last thing is we have a worksheet.

You want to track everything. This worksheet is available for download.

You can get this off the slides later.

The worksheet will actually run through the—we have some conditional rules set up,

so it'll actually warn you if your tags are too short.

So this is just starting out with your meta and your standard description.

Now here you can put in here your planning of your Open Graph tags.

So this is set up for you for that and shows you which ones are required.

We have your campaign variables that you can put in your source, your medium,

and your name.

And guess what? The worksheet automatically tags your URLs.

So it's a URL builder as well. Okay, you've got all that.

All you have to do is now you're going to plan your social shares,

plan the length of how long your share is—especially for Twitter—and that's it.

All you have to do is cut and paste and let Google+ and Facebook

pull the elements from the page, and you're going to track your analytics.

And we're done. [applause]

I want to—wait, wait, wait—one more thing—one more thing.

That was done with the steps. I want to leave you with this.

You have no second chance to make a good first impression.

Okay. [applause] Thank you.

[female speaker] Thank you, Dana.

[Dana] I'm going to say one more thing.

There is a slide—I think I just clicked through it—there is a slide for resources so I have—

oh, whoever did that, thank you. That was like magic.

[female speaker] It was those magical guys back there.

[Dana] Yeah, so there are some resources with the link to the presentation,

as well as for you to download the spread sheet.

And it's free Creative Commons if you want to—links, that works out great.

[female speaker] I love all the free stuff. [laughs]

[Dana] Yeah, lots of free stuff here.

[female speaker] All right, we have a few minutes for questions. Who wants to go first?

[Dana] Okay. That's easy. How many of you are using Open Graph? Excellent.

[female speaker] Wow, I'd expect more hands.

[Dana] Yeah, yeah. That's good. We have one.

[female speaker] We got one.

[female audience member] So I have a question for you. >>[Dana] Okay.

[female audience member] Are there any good WordPress plugins

to do this automatically?

[Dana] Yeah. Actually, Yoast—Joost de Valk has a WordPress plugin,

and that's listed in the resources.

Good question. I'm glad you asked that.

Joost de Valk has his plugin and then there is another WordPress plugin called Like,

and those are listed on the resource page.

All right.

[female speaker] All right. Thank you. [applause]