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Another fantastic new feature in APEX 22.2 - Meta Tags, will allow not only то havе nice previews of our public web pages, but also а better SEO.
Creating apps built with ❤️ using Oracle APEX. PL/SQL dev. Exploring the AI and ML world. Keen on front-end, visual arts and new technologies. Love travel, sports, photography.
Hi Plamen,
Good job. Is it supposed to work only on Friendly URLs?
Thanks, Eric
Impressions from APEX Alpe Adria 2026
The Use Case Oracle APEX has a special template for Dialog Pages, called Drawer. This template is also available for any Region on you Page (this time called Inline Drawer). 💡 A Drawer is an overlay
The Use case (and the issue) What you see on this screenshot is a pretty common requirement in an APEX application - A form, where you have some text item or dropdown menu, followed by a button or som
The power of Claude Code - offline, free, secure
Using a REST Media Resource as an image source
Meta tags are text fragments that describe a page's content. They only appear in the source code of a page, not on the actual page. They are typically found at the "head" of the page. The "meta" in these tags stands for "metadata," which is information about the information on your page. Meta tags are simply tiny content descriptors that assist in describing to search engines the subject matter of a web page. They are also used by other websites when they need to generate a preview of your page, including title, description, image and so on.
You can now define meta tags for your public-facing APEX pages directly from Page Designer. This is especially useful when combining with the new Share dynamic action to display page previews on social media.
Let's start by saying that having Meta Tags in your APEX application was still possible in previous versions. But they had to be added manually either in some of the Page Templates or in the Header of each individual page. Now in 22.2 it is all declarative and a lot more convenient. Let's go through the changes that APEX introduced in 22.2 in regards to Meta Tags.
Authentication settings under Security in your Page properties.
description and twitter:image Meta Tags in one of my demo pages. Note that you can use Application Static Files or Workspace ones.
To learn more about the Twitter and Open Graph specific Meta Tags, visit the following links:
🔗 Open Graph Meta Tags, used by Facebook
🔗 Twitter cards - getting started
🔗 Twitter cards - Meta Tags described
Here is how my HTML meta tags look like after being created from the APEX builder:
<!-- Most important Meta Tags - the title and description -->
<meta name="title" content="Overview of the APEX new features ">
<meta name="description" content="An APEX demo page for some of the new features in versions 21.2 and 22.2 - Device Geolocation, Text Field with autocomplete, Number item, Meta Tags.">
<!-- Facebook and Twitter specific Meta Tags -->
<meta property="og:type" content="website">
<meta property="og:title" content="Overview of the APEX new features ">
<meta property="og:description" content="An APEX demo page for some of the new features in versions 21.2 and 22.2 - Device Geolocation, Text Field with autocomplete, Number item, Meta Tags.">
<meta property="og:image" content="https://apex.oracle.com/pls/apex/r/gamma_dev/100771/files/static/v87/meta_tag_image.png">
<meta name="twitter:card" content="summary_large_image">
<meta name="twitter:title" content="Overview of the APEX new features ">
<meta name="twitter:description" content="An APEX demo page for some of the new features in versions 21.2 and 22.2 - Device Geolocation, Text Field with autocomplete, Number item, Meta Tags.">
<meta name="twitter:image" content="https://apex.oracle.com/pls/apex/r/gamma_dev/100771/files/static/v87/meta_tag_image.png">
It's always good to go through the documentation to check for some limitations. The
twitter:descriptionfor example can be up to 200 characters. And it can be used with thetwitter:cardtag, having a value ofsummary_large_image.
A screenshot of the page, being shared in Microsoft Teams
A screenshot of the page, being shared on Twitter and Facebook
Some observations that I have, using the Meta Tags to share page across social networks:
- ⚠️ If you had an existing Public Page and you now added the Meta Tags to it, Twitter might not generate a nice card for it right away. I guess this is due to the fact that the page might have already been indexed and cached with the old version, having no Meta Tags. Creating a brand new page, with Meta Tags and making it public on the other hand always worked for me. So don't get discouraged if you don't see a nice Card in Twitter when sharing your page. Facebook doesn't seem to have that issue or at least it always worked for me - no matter when the page was created or if it had Meta Tags or not before.
- ⚠️ If you still don't see a nice card generated, play around with the following parameters of the
Application Definition/Security:
- Under
Authorization, disable theRun on Public Pagesoption- Under
Session Management, setRejoin Sessionsto Enabled for Public Sessions andDeep Linkingto Enabled
The Twitter Card is not displaying? - As rightly suggested it has to do with web crawlers having not yet indexed/reindexed your page. Here is what Twitter says about the frequency of that check:
"❔My Tweet shows an outdated version of my Card.
💡 Once your domain is known to the validator, the web crawler re-indexes the meta information on your tag roughly every seven days."
🔗 Full Twitter Card Troubleshooting guide could be found HERE.
SEO for public websites has long benefited from the use of meta tags. In other words, how Google and other search engines rank your web pages is dependant on them. In a nutshell, search engines have specialised bots that browse the web and scan websites. Meta tags are one of the things they are looking for. Additionally, the more exact and superior your Meta Tags are, the higher you can be rated when someone looks for the information you have to offer.
Speaking about
SEOand especiallytitleanddescription. Many people still use thekeywordsmeta tag too. Forget about it. Google doesn't care about it. Read the following page from Google - it will clear a lot.
🔗 Google indexing and meta tags
Here are some important things to keep in mind, while adding the Meta Tags.
title, og:title, twitter:titleTo have the best version of your titles, you can use special tools to help you with that.
🔗 Monster Insights gives a rating from 1 to 100 of your title and tells you what can be improved.
description, og:description, twitter:descriptiontwitter:description limit of 200 characters. og:description, used by Facebook allows up to 300 characters. So my recommendation is to try to stay below 150 characters, but also consider having two or three versions for each of the three Meta Tags, depending on your target audience.Improve, etc.robotsindex/noindex – This tells the engines whether to show your page in search results or not.follow/nofollow – This tells the engines what to do with links on your pages: whether they should trust and “follow” your links to the next page or not.A
robotsMeta Tag with a value ofnoindexfor example could be useful to include in your APEX page while being still in development. Once all is ready, just change it and Google will recognize that and index the page. To learn more about therobotsMeta Tag, visit Google's documentation:
title and description, let's move on to the next step - telling Google some more about us.
Having a record in the Google Search Console for your application has some very important benefits:
description and title tags)To start using the Google Search Console, go to the following URL and login using a Google account: 🔗 Google Search Console Login
Add Property option.URL prefix property type section and click on Continue. This is the URL to your APEX application.HTML tag and copy the values. This is a special google-site-verification Meta Tag that we will use to prove ownership of the application/website.google-site-verification Meta Tag:Application Definition / User Interface, adding the following HTML<meta name="google-site-verification" content="YOUR-VERIFICATION-KEY" />
Page Template in Shared Components by adding the same HTML<meta name="google-site-verification" content="YOUR-VERIFICATION-KEY" />
Ownership Verified success message.
Last step - generating a sitemap.xml file. This will later be added to the Google Search Console in Sitemaps section.
A sitemap lists a website's most important pages, thus, making sure search engines can find and crawl them. Sitemaps also help in understanding your website structure, making it easier to navigate your website.
But do we really need a sitemap? Here is what Google has to say about it:
If your site's pages are properly linked, Google can usually discover most of your site. Proper linking means that all pages that you deem important can be reached through some form of navigation, be that your site's menu or links that you placed on pages. Even so, a sitemap can improve the crawling of larger or more complex sites, or more specialized files.
🔗 To read more about Sitemaps and how Google uses them, visit their Sitemaps Overview Page.
Having said that, and in case you really do think a sitemap would be beneficial, a sitemap.xml can be manually generated and placed into your APEX Static Files.
🔗 You can also read Anton Nielsen's post in Insum's blog and implement his solution in your app. What the sitemap.xml should look like is the following:
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
<url>
<loc>https://mywebsiteurl/</loc>
<changefreq> always </changefreq>
<priority> 1 </priority>
<lastmod>2022-10-17T07:28:41.783Z</lastmod>
</url>
<url>
<loc>https://mywebsiteurl/using-meta-tags/</loc>
<changefreq> daily </changefreq>
<priority> 0.8 </priority>
<lastmod>2022-10-17T07:28:41.783Z</lastmod>
</url>
</urlset>
🔗 Thanks to Vincent Morneau for introducing Meta Tags new feature during the APEX Office Hours and in his Blog Post earlier.
🔗 Check all the new features in APEX 22.2 on the Official Website.
🔗 To learn more about them, watch the official release videos.
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