About Open Graph and Rich Snippet and their role in SEO ranking

Open Graph

What is an Open Graph? 

An Open Graph is a protocol which allows a web page to become a "rich" object in a social network. More specifically, the Open Graph Protocol is a set of tags that allows a webmaster to give major social networks (Facebook, Google +, Twitter, Linked in...) detailed information about its pages. This information will allow social networks to better display a link on those pages that have been placed by the users. 

The Open Graph protocol has been originally created by Facebook and is now managed by the Open Web Foundation.

What is the impact of the Open Graph on SEO?  

In theory, the impact of the Open Graph on SEO is limited. Actually, the Open Graph protocol is intended primarily to social networks (Facebook, Google +, Twitter...) and not to search engines (Google, Bing...)  

In practice, however, the social networks, like Facebook for example, have become so important in recent years that the search engines can’t ignore the Open Graph data in their algorithms. It would be adventurous enough to accurately describe the impact of this kind of data, but its impact undoubtedly exists. It is also certain that the major search engines analyze these Open Graph tags. In particular, Google may tend to favor pages used in its Google + social network.  

For SEO, historically, the webmasters should primarily focus their attention on the title and Meta description tags of their pages. Today, it is equally important to add Open Graph tags on the web pages, particularly if these pages are frequently shared on social networks like Facebook

Rich snippets 

What are Rich snippets? 

A snippet is a result Google shows to the user in the search results. An example: I was searching for a good recipe for homemade ice-cream and googled it. Google showed me a results list with normal snippets and rich snippets. A normal snippet looks like this

In this snippet, a picture of the ice-cream is added; you can see the rating of the recipe, the time it takes to prepare this type of ice-cream and the number of calories it contains. A rich snippet contains much more information than the normal snippet does. That’s why we call it a rich snippet. 

Why are Rich snippets important for SEO? 

Rich snippets stand out from the other snippets. They look much nicer and you’ll instantly know more, just by looking at them. You’ll know whether other people liked the homemade ice cream and how long it’ll take you to make it. Rich snippets are snippets that have a higher click-through rate. People like to click on rich snippets. If the click-through rate of a snippet increases, you’ll get more traffic from that search result. Not because your position in the search engine changed, but just because more people click on your result. In the long run, rich snippets will have an effect on your ranking as well. As more people click on your result, Google will notice that people prefer your page above other ones. That’ll absolutely improve your rankings in the long run.

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