HD-Juicey Metadata plugin for Joomla 3.5

Boost the Google Juice of your Joomla website by inserting Open Graph metadata, Twitter Card metadata and Geolocation co-ordinates. Help get recognised on social search engines.

what is this? | what's the point? | what to do after installing? | how do I add an intro image? | testing the metadata

What is this?

HD-Juicey is a plugin that embeds Open Graph metadata and Twitter Card metadata into your web pages. This is the markup used by Facebook, Twitter & LinkedIn to map and categorise websites into it's own social search engine. The metadata includes standard information (such as page title, type, URL & site name), locale information (based on the language used on your site) and a page description and image to illustrate the content of the page.

What's the point?

Google may dominate the search engine scene and attract more traffic than any other site but Facebook comes a close second. The Open Graph Protocol is an attempt to link Facebook with the rest of the web, creating Facebook’s own extensive and highly interactive version of a search engine. Other sites (including LinkedIn) and apps also use the same metadata for their own purpose. Twitter also uses the Open Graph Protocol but favours it's own metadata known as Twitter Cards.

This plugin ensures that the correct data is displayed when someone tries to share a link to your site on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other sites. The graph "type" ensures that your site is categorized in the correct section (eg. website, article, book, music, video) and it also includes metadata to present a description and . More information on the Open Graph Protocol is available here.

What to do after installing?

Install the zip file via the administration install manager as per any other module. Once it has installed go to the plugin manager, select HD-Juicey MetaData and enable the plugin.

Under the Basic parameter settings, select a "type" from the drop down list that your website primarily falls under (this is usually "website" but the full list of options is available here) and an "image" than can be used as a default thumbnail image to represent the site overall. On "article" based pages where an intro image has been selected, this will be used instead. If no intro image is found then the default thumbnail image will be used.

You only need to enable the Admin parameter field if you wish to test your site using the Facebook URL linter, it is not required for anything other than admin testing. The id number required is the nine digit id number displayed in the URL of your Facebook's profile page.

How do I add an intro image?

An intro image can be added to an article via the Article Manager.

The intro image can be selected by clicking on the "Images & Links" tab on the right hand side of the Article Manager page.

This plugin has been built to display the article's intro image as the Facebook thumbnail image, however if no intro image is found then the default image you selected is displayed instead.

Similarly, intro images only work on webpages that are set to the "Article View" Menu Item. If the page is linked to a different type of menu item then the default image you selected is displayed instead.

How do I test the Metadata?

Use the Facebook URL linter to test the validity of the metadata.