Getting title tag and meta tags from a website using PHP

14 May 2024

I was developing a SEO tool, where I needed to gather information about websites title and description.

Getting metadata with get_meta_tags

The get_meta_tags function extracts all meta tag content attributes from a website.

The function does not however extract the contents of the title tag, so there we have to utilize another method.

Using DOMDocument to extract information from HTML

Using DOMDocument we can easily extract the contents of the title tag from the websites HTML. The method is quite similar to how I webscrape in Python using BeautifulSoup. You can extract the contents of the title tag like this:

$html = file_get_contents($url);
$doc = new \DOMDocument();
$doc->loadHTML($html);
$nodes = $doc->getElementsByTagName('title');
$title = $nodes->item(0)->nodeValue;

Using this method we can also continue our data collection and grab the description or other metadata. This can be achieved like this:

$metas = $doc->getElementsByTagName('meta');

for ($i = 0; $i < $metas->length; $i++)
{
    $meta = $metas->item($i);
    if ($meta->getAttribute('name') == 'description')
    {
        $description = $meta->getAttribute('content');
    }
}

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