Twitter Cards

[d]online - Twitter Card Example

[d]online - Twitter Card Example

If you’re an avid user of Twitter, you’ve probably noticed the new links that show up on the bottom of certain tweets in your feed. The links say “View Summary” and allow you to read the title and excerpt of an article, along with a thumbnail of the article’s featured image. Those links are called Twitter Cards, come in three different varieties: summaries, photos, and play, and have two different layouts:  web and mobile.

Twitter Cards help increase your visibility and ensourage users to click to your site by providing more information beyond Twitter’s 140 character limit. Furthermore, design and development studios with Twitter Card functionality built into their site can provide a working example for clients to see how the same functionality can be implemented into their sites.

As with most of Twitter’s APIs, Twitter cards are fairly quick to implement. All you need to do is insert some metadata, test, and apply to participate. To make things even easier, Niall Kennedy has created a WordPress plug-in to automatically scrape your post’s title, permalink, description and image URL for summary Twitter cards. After installing and activating the plug-in, preview your Twitter card by pasting the post’s URL into their preview page.Lastly, you’ll need to apply to participate. Simply enter your site and contact information here and Twitter will reply within 5-10 business days.

25 Tips for Optimizing a Blog’s Google Sitelinks

25 Tips for Optimizing a Blog’s Google Sitelinks

The following is an excerpt from a new Informational Resource I’ve posted on my company‘s web site:

What are Sitelinks?

The links shown below some of Google’s search results (1), called sitelinks (2), are meant to help users navigate sites. Google’s systems analyze the link structure of each site to find shortcuts that will save users time and allow them to quickly find the information they’re looking for.

Google only shows sitelinks for results when they think they’ll be useful to the user. If the structure of the site doesn’t allow their algorithms to find good sitelinks, or they don’t think that the sitelinks for the site are relevant for the user’s query, Google won’t show them. At the moment, sitelinks are automated, but there are best practices site owner’s can follow, however, to improve the quality of their sitelinks.

Read the rest of the article here…