Meta tags are hidden tags that provide a summary about your web page to the search engines. While meta tags are invisible in the web page itself, they can be read by search engines and web crawlers. You can also see the meta tags in the web page if you know how to inspect the HTML source.
Search engines use meta tags information to understand how they should display the page information in the search results. Also, that information tells the web browser how to display it to the end user. Moreover, meta tags are crucial for rankings in the search results and must be used correctly for SEO.
Do Meta Tags Help with SEO
The SEO community is definitive on this topic. The most important meta tag for ranking is your title tag. A good title should help you to rank for a keyword and makes people want to click on it. With click-through rates increasing, your ranking in the search results will increase as well.
No other meta tags other than title affect SEO rankings but...that's not to say they're unimportant!
Title: Very Important.
Description: Less Important.
Image: Moderately Important.
Keyword: Negative Importance.
How this API works
The most basic functionality of Meta Tags API is to scrape the provided URL and parse the response text immediately in order to detect all the meta tags available.
The API response provides below information:
- Title tag value
- OpenGraph Meta Tags
- Favicon Image URL
- Canonical URL
- IP Address of the remote site, as resolved by DNS server
- HTML size of the remote document (in bytes)
- Fetch_duration: How many milliseconds did it take to fetch the page?
- Number of Scripts: How many JS documents are linkedin in the page
- Number of Stylesheets: How many CSS documents are linkedin in the page
Rotating Proxy Support
Meta Tags API allows you to utilize thousands of different IP addresses to route your requests through. Rotating proxies are essential to overcome IP fingerprinting and rate-limit problems for web scraping. If for any reason you may need this functionality, Meta Tags API features a query parameter called "proxy". Just set the “proxy” parameter to true and your requests will automatically be using rotating proxies and your scraping requests will arrive from millions of different IP addresses all around the world.
Sample code
Following is a sample cURL call for parsing the meta tags of apilayer.com web site.
curl --location --request \
GET 'https://api.apilayer.com/meta_tags?url=apilayer.com&proxy=true' \
--header 'apikey: YOUR API KEY'
And the result of this call is below:
{
"meta_tags": [
{
"charset": "utf-8"
},
{
"name": "viewport",
"content": "width=device-width, initial-scale=1, shrink-to-fit=no"
},
{
"name": "description",
"content": "Highly curated API marketplace with a focus on reliability and scalability. Allows software developers building the next big thing much easier and faster."
},
{
"name": "twitter:card",
"content": "summary"
},
{
"name": "twitter:site",
"content": "@apilayer"
},
{
"name": "twitter:creator",
"content": "@apilayer"
},
{
"property": "og:title",
"content": "APILayer | Hassle free API marketplace"
},
{
"property": "og:description",
"content": "API marketplace and ready to run app backends for your mobile app and website."
},
{
"property": "og:image",
"content": "https://assets.apilayer.com/logo/square_large_bg.png"
}
],
"title": "APILayer - Hassle free API marketplace",
"favicon": "https://assets.apilayer.com/favicon.ico",
"canonical": "https://apilayer.com",
"host": {
"ip_address": "104.26.10.107",
"domain": "apilayer.com",
"scheme": "http"
},
"stats": {
"bytes": 47323,
"fetch_duration": 2530.836,
"number_of_scripts": 31,
"number_of_stylesheets": 5
}
}
