Dreamweaver Tutorial: Add Open Graph META Tags for Social Sharing

Written by Gabriel on March 28, 2013

Learn How to Add Open Graph META Tags to Adobe Dreamweaver Websites

What are Open Graph Tags for?

It’s no secret that Facebook is a major driver of information sharing and website traffic generation. This is a great asset to web developers who’s primary job is to communicate and deliver messages for website owners and businesses. Open Graph Meta Tags have been leveraged, most notably by Facebook, to share website content. The Open Graph protocol permits webmasters to plan how their site content will be displayed when it is shared socially. Marketers know that when you get a small snippet to promote your activities, you must pick every word, image, and link very carefully. Open Graph Meta Tags give you that precise control over your marketing message when it goes viral on Facebook and other content sharing websites like Google.

How do Open Graph Meta Tags work?

When a content sharing website that uses Open Graph Meta Tags displays a link to your webpage, it checks for specific meta tags in the HTML . These specific tags are listed below in detail for your use. These tags tell the sharing website the specific content to display in the link including an image, a few pieces of text, and the appropriate url to link.

Open Graph Tags are not just for Facebook

Open Graph Meta Tags are most useful for social sharing websites where your content can go viral in an afternoon, when a link to your content looks good it attracts more eyes and generates more shares and clicks. This is most used with Facebook because of its popularity, but other social media websites use Open Graph Tags too! Google is likely the second most relevant user of Open Graph Tags.

In this Dreamweaver tutorial, we show you how to easily add OG META tags to your Dreamweaver website.

Have a look at Facebook’s implementation of the Open Graph tags as well as Google +1’s use of the Open Graph protocol to see some examples.

Step 1: Finding the proper place for your META tags

If you get this step wrong, then this is all for naught! So, pay careful attention as you go through this guide.

Once you have you HTML page (.html) or Dreamweaver Template (.dwt) open, select View from the top menu bar (to the right of the File and Edit menu items). Under View you will see an item called Head Content, this item needs a checkmark beside it. If there is no checkmark there, click on Head Content; if the checkmark is already present, you do not need to click on it. Activating the View Head Content option in the main menu will make all the tags in the <head> visible as icons in the Design View.

Now, we will switch from Design View to Slit View. With Split selected, click into the Head Content area just to the right of the little icons. This will place your cursor inside the <head> HTML. Now look to the left of the Design View to see that your cursor has been placed just before the closing </head> tag. This is exactly where we need to add our new META tags for the Open Graph protocol!

Step 2: Insert the proper Open Graph META Tags

Now that we have the cursor in exactly the right spot for these META tags, we will copy the tags below and paste them directly into the HTML code. This must be done carefully and most importantly make sure that each Open Graph META tag is on its own line.

In the code above, you will want to replace the bold text within the quotes after content= with your own copy or url depending on which og property it is. Each meta tag has a property=”og:__” that tells you what it does. You can learn more Open Graph META Tags at http://ogp.me/. In this Open Graph tag tutorial for Dreamweaver, we show you the properties for Title, Description, Image, & URL. You can use as many or as few as suit your needs – if you want to start basic, use just a the og:image property so that you will get a nifty image next to the automatically generated text for your social link. Once you have this all set up and live online, it is time to test it out using Facebook’s Open Graph testing tool.

Posted in Adobe Dreamweaver

2 Comments to “Dreamweaver Tutorial: Add Open Graph META Tags for Social Sharing”

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Tim

December 9, 2015 at 11:10 pm | Permalink

Thanks for this great tutorial which recently help my new student

Reply
C program

August 8, 2016 at 10:12 am | Permalink

Thanks a lot .. this is very useful for new frontend developer.

Reply

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