When someone pastes your link into a chat, a post or a message, the preview that pops up — title, description, image — isn't random. It's controlled by a few meta tags in your page's HTML. Skip them and your link shows up as a bare URL nobody clicks.
Open Graph: the foundation
Open Graph tags (the og: ones) are read by most platforms. The essentials are a title, a description, an image and the page URL. The image does the heavy lifting — a clear 1200×630 image is the difference between a link that gets clicked and one that gets scrolled past.
- og:title — usually your page title, kept punchy.
- og:description — one or two compelling sentences.
- og:image — a 1200×630 image, ideally under a megabyte.
- og:url — the canonical address of the page.
Twitter cards: the finishing touch
X (Twitter) reads its own twitter: tags, falling back to Open Graph when they're missing. Adding a twitter:card type of summary_large_image gives you that big, eye-catching preview.
Check before you ship
Titles and descriptions get truncated if they run long, and a missing image leaves an awkward gap. Previewing how the link will render across Google, X and Facebook before publishing — and copying the exact tags to paste in — saves you from finding out the embarrassing way.