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February 22, 2014

Okay so you want a Facebook like button on your website.  Great idea and it is super easy to do... or is it?  Facebook has recently upgraded their API for like and share buttons and things have gotten a little more complex than they were before.  Open Graph meta tags used to be an "optional option".  Now, if I may coin a crazy phrase, it is a "necessary option".

When you check your site on the Open Graph Debugger (https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/) it will now warn you that if you want shares TO your site to have any weight at all you need to implement the open graph meta tags on your website.

Doing this is not terribly hard, but you do need to dig into the HTML header of your website.  A correct set of open graph meta tags would look like this:

<meta property="fb:app_id" content="337784872990157" />
<meta property="og:type" content="website" />
<meta property="og:title" content="A page title here"/>
<meta property="og:description" content="A description here"/>
<meta property="og:url" content="http://inventaweb.net/Blog"/>
<meta property="og:image" content="http://inventaweb.net/img/web/globeOG.jpg"/>
 
If you do not have your app id in your header Facebook will ding you hard, if you don't have the other things your post will not be very attractive.  So take some time and update your site, or give us a call today and we will do it for you.