Open Graph image: what shows when a guest shares your park.
When a guest pastes your link into a family group text or a Facebook RV group, the app shows a preview card: a picture, a title, a line of text. The picture comes from a tag on your page. If the tag is missing, the card is blank or shows your logo cropped badly, and fewer people tap it.
IN ONE PARAGRAPH
Open Graph is a set of tags in a page's code that social apps and messaging apps read to build a link preview. The og:image tag names the picture. It does not affect Google rankings. It affects whether the people your guests share the link with tap it, which is free traffic from the best source there is: a recommendation. A park's og:image should be a wide, real photo of the park, at least 1200 by 630 pixels, set on every page. We flag any page without one.
What the tags are
Four lines in the page's code: og:title, og:description, og:image, and og:url. Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, iMessage, WhatsApp, Slack, and most forums read them to build the preview card. Twitter uses a parallel set. The image is the one that matters most; a card with a good photo gets tapped, a card with a blank gray box does not.
What it looks like on a park website
- No og:image, so the preview shows nothing, or the first image the app can find, which is often the credit card logos in the footer.
- The logo as the og:image, cropped to a wide rectangle so half of it is missing.
- An image that is too small and comes out blurry.
- The homepage image on every page, so a share of the cabins page shows the highway sign.
What it costs a park
A returning guest posts "we loved this place" in a 40,000-member RV group with your link. With a good image, the post shows the river sites at sunset and gets taps. Without one, it shows a gray box and scrolls past. That post was worth more than any ad, and the difference was one tag. The same applies to the family group text that decides where the reunion is.
How to check your own site
- Paste your homepage address into a text to yourself, or into a Facebook post draft, and look at the preview.
- View the page source and search for og:image. Open the address it names and check it is a real, wide photo.
- Do the same for the cabins page and the sites page.
What we do about it
Every page we build carries the full set of Open Graph tags, with a wide photo of the park at the right size and a page-specific one where it helps: the cabins on the cabins page, the river on the sites page. It is a small thing that pays off every time a guest shares the link, which is exactly when you want it to look right.
Questions about this.
What size should an og:image be?
At least 1200 by 630 pixels, in a wide rectangle. Smaller images come out blurry or get cropped; square logos lose their edges.
Does the Open Graph image affect Google rankings?
No. It affects link previews on Facebook, in messaging apps, and on forums, which decide whether shared links get clicked.
Should every page have its own og:image?
Ideally the main pages do: the cabins on the cabins page, the sites on the sites page. At minimum every page should carry one good photo of the park rather than nothing.
How do I see what my link looks like when shared?
Paste the address into a text message to yourself or a Facebook post draft and look at the preview card. Facebook also has a free Sharing Debugger that shows what it reads.
Want this checked on your park site?
Send us the address. We run the full check and tell you what we found, in plain words. SEO for parks starts at $250 a month.
Part of the RV park SEO guide, section: The technical check. Previous: Canonical tags: telling Google which page is the real one. Next: Structured data: telling Google exactly what your park is.