When someone shares your page on LinkedIn, Facebook, X or in a chat app, that app does not read your page the way a visitor does. It reads a handful of meta tags in your HTML and builds a card from them. TamRank writes those tags for every page, and lets you override them per page when the default is not the one you want.
In short
TamRank outputs Open Graph and Twitter Card tags automatically, using your meta title, description and featured image. You change them in the Social tab of the TamRank SEO box, and the preview there shows the result before you publish. These fields are separate from your search title and description, which live in the SEO tab.
Where to find it
Open any post or page and find the TamRank SEO box below the editor. The Social tab sits next to SEO, Content and Schema. It holds a social title, a social description and a social image, plus a live preview of how that card looks on Facebook, X, LinkedIn and Instagram.
Leave a field empty and TamRank falls back to what it already knows: your meta title, your meta description and the featured image. Filling a field only makes sense when the shared version should read differently from the search version, which is more often than people expect. A search result is read by someone who is already looking; a shared link is read by someone who is not.
What TamRank writes
On every page, TamRank outputs the tags that the major platforms actually read:
og:title,og:description,og:url,og:typeandog:site_nameog:image, including its dimensions, so the platform can reserve the right space instead of guessingtwitter:card,twitter:title,twitter:descriptionandtwitter:image
You do not have to add any of these by hand. If your theme or another SEO plugin already outputs Open Graph tags, remove one of the two: two sets of tags on one page is the most common reason a preview shows the wrong image.
Choosing the image
The image is the part people notice, and the part that most often goes wrong. Three things to keep in mind:
- Use a landscape image. Portrait images get cropped from the middle, which is usually where your text is.
- Keep it under 300KB. A slow image means the platform gives up and shows a bare link.
- Text on the image is optional but it should survive being scaled down. If you cannot read it on your phone, it is too small.
Set a custom social image per page in the Social tab when the featured image is not the one you want shared. That is common on posts where the featured image is decorative but the shared card needs to carry the point.
Custom meta tags
If you need a tag TamRank does not write, add it under TamRank → Settings. That is the place for verification tags and for platform tags that only apply to your site. It is not the place for the tags above, which TamRank already handles.
Troubleshooting
The platform still shows the old image. Social platforms cache what they scraped. Changing the tag does not clear their cache. Use the platform’s own debugger to re-scrape the URL, and check the tag in your page source first so you are not clearing a cache for a tag that never changed.
The preview is empty. Check that the page is public and not set to noindex. A page that blocks crawlers blocks scrapers too.
The wrong text appears. Look for a second set of Open Graph tags in your page source, from your theme or from another plugin. Whichever comes last usually wins, and it is rarely the one you edited.
Frequently asked questions
Do Open Graph tags affect my Google ranking? No. They control how a shared link looks, not how the page ranks. The tags that matter for search are your meta title and description.
Do I need both Open Graph and Twitter Card tags? TamRank writes both, so you do not have to choose. X falls back to Open Graph when a Twitter tag is missing, but the fallback is not identical, so having both is the safer default.
Can I set a different image per platform? No, and in practice you do not want to. One good landscape image works everywhere.
Related
- The search side of the same box: Writing meta titles and descriptions
- Keeping that image light: Image optimization
- The bigger picture: The complete WordPress SEO guide
