Social sharing previews
Link preview tags missing
One of the 136 checks Lala SEO runs on every page of a site in a free audit.
- How serious
- Worth knowing. Small, or only matters in some cases. Read it and decide.
- Score
- Reported, but it does not lower your site's score.
- Based on
- Industry standard: Google does not document this one, so the check follows established practice.
What is wrong
When someone shares a link to your site on social media or messaging apps, those platforms look for special tags in your page code—called Open Graph tags—to create a preview showing your page title, description, and image. If these tags are absent, the preview will be blank or incomplete, showing only a URL with no context.
Why it costs you
A weak or missing preview means fewer people will click through from social platforms. Friends see only a bare link instead of an appealing preview, so they are less likely to visit. This directly reduces traffic from social referrals.
How to fix it
Add Open Graph meta tags to your page templates. Insert these into the `<head>` section: `<meta property="og:title" content="Your page title">`, `<meta property="og:description" content="Your description">`, and `<meta property="og:image" content="URL to image">`. Do this once in your template rather than on individual pages, so all pages inherit them. You can customise the content value for each page if your template allows dynamic content insertion.
What the audit tests
- The page sets a title for link previews (og:title)
- The page sets a description for link previews (og:description)
- The page sets an image for link previews (og:image)
- The page sets its own address for link previews (og:url)
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