SEO & Metadata
What is Open Graph?
A meta-tag protocol Facebook introduced in 2010 that tells social platforms how to render a link preview, title, description, image, and type.
Open Graph tags live in the page <head>: <meta property="og:title" content="…">, <meta property="og:description" content="…">, <meta property="og:image" content="…">. When someone pastes the URL into Slack, Facebook, LinkedIn, or iMessage, those tags drive the preview card.
Twitter has a parallel set of tags (twitter:card, twitter:title, etc.) that take precedence when set, but most sites set both with the same content. The og:image is the highest-impact field by far, a good 1200x630 image triples click-through versus the auto-extracted alternative.
Brand.dev returns the Open Graph metadata for every URL we scrape. For brand monitoring, lead enrichment, and "what does this domain look like in social previews" use cases, OG tags are usually the cleanest data source on the page.
In the wild
- →
<meta property="og:title" content="Brand.dev, Brand Intelligence API"> - →
<meta property="og:image" content="https://brand.dev/social.png"> - →
<meta property="og:type" content="website">
How Brand.dev uses open graph
Endpoints in the Brand.dev API where this concept comes up directly.
FAQ
Open Graph vs Twitter Cards?
Open Graph is the original Facebook spec; Twitter Cards are Twitter's. Twitter falls back to Open Graph when its own tags are missing, so in practice you only need to set Twitter-specific tags when you want a different preview on Twitter.
What size should the og:image be?
1200x630 is the universal sweet spot, looks crisp on large social cards and Facebook's minimum 600x315.
Does Open Graph affect SEO?
Not directly, it's for social previews, not search. But it affects click-through from social, which feeds back into traffic and engagement signals.
Related terms
An HTML element in the `<head>` that supplies metadata about the page, title, description, viewport, social previews, robots directives.
Information on a page formatted so that machines can parse its meaning, not just its text, the foundation for rich snippets and AI-powered search.
Structured data added to a page using the schema.org vocabulary so search engines can understand its meaning and show rich results.