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#6078 – sh404sef OG Properties

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Sunday, 17 November 2019 17:26 UTC

kars

Hi there!

I am curious if you guys might consider adding an input text field in sh404self admin to specifically place an OG description (and maybe even specific title). As we know, the OG area for Facebook and LinkedIn posts is much shorter than what is supported in META descriptions. As such, I am currently finding I have to either use a shorter (less ideal) META tag, or have an OG tag that is truncated - and not the best call to action once posted.

This is happening almost always with the description. The title "sometimes" - but not probably as much.

Thanks for considering!

Paul

Monday, 18 November 2019 09:54 UTC

wb_weeblr

Hi

Thanks for the heads up. It's an interesting topic and it has come up a couple of times in the last few years. I have shied away from it until now because it's such an advanced topic that only a handful of people are aware of it. 99% of our users, we have to try convince them that they should write descriptions and by far our most ever requested feature was automatic description!

We are revisiting all of this as part of the ongoing redesign of sh404SEF in the wake of Joomla 4 so now is a good time.

Can I ask if you take advantage of automatically generated descriptions and only rewrite some description, or rather you always rewrite all descriptions?

Best regards

Monday, 18 November 2019 12:40 UTC

kars

Good morning and thanks for the quick response!

If given the option, I would far prefer to manually write a description. We optimize META descriptions for keywords and CTAs in search results. Due to OG character limits, and the description being much shorter – we always find we need to adjust our phrasing for a shorter, optimized CTA.

In tracking analytics for social posts, those with well optimized descriptions / CTAs perform FAR better than those that are just automatic and then truncated with “…” for being to long.

I understand the appeal of automatic for those that do very high volume or really don’t care to optimize – but to really take advantage of OG for means of improving click -throughs, a customized OG description is a must. If it was not automatic and folks just want to use META, it’d take 2 seconds to copy/paste.

Having an option to toggle auto/manual per URL would probably work for everyone. But for me, I far prefer manual over auto if I have to pick just one.

Thanks!
Paul

P.S. Please don't forget to look into adding a field for Microsoft's UET tag for analytics tracking. Per all our digital marketing clients, we are spending more and more with Bing ads as the ROI is significantly higher for lesser cost than Google Ads. Also, the Bing demographic tends to be age 35+ and higher income vs Google - which is a great fit for many campaigns. There are 3rd party plugins possible to add the tracking script into the head - but this is getting messy with so many plugins haha. sh404sef for EVERYTHING!!! - LOL :)

Monday, 18 November 2019 14:41 UTC

wb_weeblr

If given the option, I would far prefer to manually write a description. We optimize META descriptions for keywords and CTAs in search results. Due to OG character limits, and the description being much shorter – we always find we need to adjust our phrasing for a shorter, optimized CTA.

Yep, I go that right but I was wondering if you ever just leave it to the automatic meta description.

Having an option to toggle auto/manual per URL would probably work for everyone.

Current sh404SEF behavior is:

- if user manually entered a meta description for current URL in sh404SEF, use that
- if not, and a Joomla description exists (from an article edit page or coming from an extension for instance), use Joomla description
- if not, compute an "automatic description"

Once done, we do have a meta page description: use it for OGP and Twitter cards.

But for me, I far prefer manual over auto if I have to pick just one.

you don't have to, automatic is just there if nothing else. But many people do prefer automatic to having no meta description set.

I'll look at adding a separate field for that in current sh404SEF. It may have to wait til next iteration of sh404SEF as it needs also some more settings to be controled globally.

Thanks also for the UET suggestion. I do hear more and more of Microsoft ads as a valid alternative but have no experience with it. I can do a basic implementation without much fuss but there's actually a lot to change because the current settings tab is geared towards Google stuff. I'll look at it in more details. That's probably something that'll wait for next major version though.

In the mean time, I have implemented a more "flexible" way which is to provide a free text area, globally or per URL, for text to be inserted at: top of HEAD, bottom of HEAD, top of BODY, bottom of BODY. That way it's a bit easier to really customize tracking or any other custo code actually.

Best regards

Best regards

Tuesday, 03 December 2019 05:34 UTC

system

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