When browsing your Facebook’s News Feed and reading posts from Pages, have you ever noticed the author link along with the name of the author, which links back to the personal profile of the author on Facebook. Well, that is because of Facebook’s author tag added to their site. It is in a way crediting the author and increases interaction between the author and users. In this short guide, you will learn how to add Facebook author tag in WordPress in the easiest way ever possible.
How Facebook Author Tag works
As you can see in the image above, Facebook will display a link along with the author name. When clicking on this link, it will take the user to the Facebook profile of that author. This means that if someone wants to follow that author, then they would just need to click on that link, and then start following, or add him as a friend on Facebook. This also increases trust and shows that a real person is behind that article.
Adding Facebook Author Tag in WordPress
There are two ways to add a Facebook author tag in WordPress. You can use any of these method that suits you, according to your convenience.
Method #1: Adding Facebook Author Tag using Yoast SEO
If you are already using Yoast WordPress SEO plugin then you should use this method, as it is the easiest method out there. The plugin already supports Facebook’s open graph meta data and apart from that, it is one of the most popular plugin for SEO.
So here’s what you need to do. Login to your WordPress Dashboard, go to SEO > Social and then click on Facebook’s tab. Now, check the box next to “Add Open Graph meta data.”
This will enable Open Graph meta data support in the plugin.
Next, you need to add your Facebook profile URL in your Profile page. To do this, go to Users > Your Profile page and then enter your complete Facebook profile URL in “Facebook profile URL” field. Once you do this, click on “Update Profile” button from the bottom of the screen.
That’s all you need to do. The WordPress SEO plugin will now add Facebook author tag when you publish an article. Note that the author name is only clickable when the linked profile allows followers. If you have not allowed followers, then make that change from Settings section of your Facebook account.
Bonus Tip: This same plugin also allows you to set a separate Facebook title, description, and image for each of your posts and pages. This can be done by going to the particular post, and clicking on “Social” tab.
Method #2: Adding Facebook Author Tag using code
If you think that the above plugin method is not for you, and are brave enough to manually add the code to your theme file, then this method is for you.
This method is very simple as you just need to add these two lines of code to your site’s <head> section.
<meta property="article:publisher" content="http://facebook.com/yourpagelink" /> <meta property="article:author" content="http://facebook.com/yourprofilelink" />
In this code, ensure that you are replacing the URLs with your Facebook’s page link and your personal profile link.
You would normally need to edit your website’s header.php file, but it depends on which theme you are using. To edit this file, login to your WordPress Dashboard, go to Appearance > Editor and then click on “Header” from the right side.
When you are done editing this file, click on the “Update File” button.
So that’s how you can add Facebook author tag in your WordPress site. If you have any questions, then let us know in the comments below. If you like this tutorial, then please follow us on Twitter, Facebook and Google+.