Usage of the Thumbnail_URL META

This entry was created on 08 September 2008, at 00:00 , and was last updated on the 29 March 2009, at 23:01.

The thumbnail_url META tag allows you to specify a image to be used as a thumbnail, on sites such as Digg and Facebook, when someone wants to share your site with others.

Simply add the following tag to the head section of your pages, and these sites will be able to automatically find the image you'd like to represent your site.

<meta name="thumbnail_url" content="http://static.nickjohnston.co.uk/images/logo.png" />

Some social bookmarking websites are clever and will search your page for other images, and let the user choose which to display, but using the thumbnail_url tag will usually place this image above others. On a less advanced site, the thumbnail_url tag can be picked up easily, rather than leaving your website without a thumbnail at all.

Other tags

If you search for meta tags on the internet these days, you'll likely find a collection of outdated articles describing the inclusion of the keywords meta tag. While you're free to use this, it has no influence on search engines these days.

The description meta tag remains important, as it is commonly used by search engines to describe your listing to potential visitors. A well written description can vastly increase the rate of visits, by providing an intriguing insight into the pages content.

More recently, major search engines have implemented the canonical meta tag, to notify search engines of duplicate content.