While Google has complete jurisdiction over how the search engine results page (SERP) appears, you can change how your website appears in Search. In this post we'll review the controls you have over how your website appears on Google and how to help the search engine understand and present your content. Many of those same controls now also decide how Google's AI features use your pages.

Page Titles and Meta Descriptions

Let's start with the basics. Every page needs a title in a title tag that describes the page concisely, and a description meta tag that tells Searchers what they can expect if they click. Titles greatly influence whether a Searcher clicks on the result, so make them as appealing as possible. Approach the description like you would a paid Google Ad and make every word count.

Google has a habit of rewriting both to better match a query. It draws title links from the title tag, headings, and anchor text, and it builds most snippets from the page content itself, using your meta description when it describes the page more accurately. Keyword stuffing and heavy boilerplate are two of the most common reasons Google rewrites a title, so avoid both.

Length is a matter of pixels, not characters. Google doesn't set a character limit; it truncates titles and snippets to fit the device width. A title with lots of wide letters gets cut off sooner than a title of the same character count with narrow ones. Rather than counting characters, check how each title and description renders in a SERP preview tool, and put the words that matter most at the front.

For more on writing titles and descriptions that hold up across search and AI tools, see our guide to consistent meta titles and descriptions.

Using Structured Data for SEO

Structured data, also known as Schema markup, provides information about a page in a standardized format. This markup helps search engines quickly classify the content of a page. For example, a page using the recipe schema will have cooking duration, cooking method, yield, and more. Recipe is just one of many schemas - here's the full list.

Between JSON-LD, Microdata, and RDFa, JSON-LD is Google's preferred format, and users report that it's easiest to use. Search engine optimization with structured data markup is easier with WordPress SEO plugins like RankMath and Yoast SEO because they write the code to create structured data automatically for you.

Why go through all the bother of implementing structured data?

Using structured data enables Google to create rich snippets, also called rich results. These are search listings enhanced with extra information pulled from your markup, which can show:

  • A picture.
  • A star rating.
  • Info like preparation time and calorie count.
  • In a carousel.

Those rich snippets stand out from the ordinary search results that Google displays. Certainly they're more visually appealing and thus likely to get the click.

There are certain guidelines that you need to follow when implementing structured data. Google's Rich Results Test tells you whether a page is eligible for rich results based on the markup you've provided, and the Schema Markup Validator checks your schema.org markup more generally. That's important because violating Google's guidelines can make your page ineligible for rich results. In the worst case scenario, you could receive a manual action against your page. Keep in mind that structured data isn't a ranking factor, and using it doesn't guarantee that you'll rank.

Featured snippets appear at the very top of some search results, with an excerpt from the page shown first, followed by the page URL and title.

There are four common types of featured snippets:

  • Paragraph snippet.
  • List snippet.
  • Table snippet.
  • Video/image snippet.

Clicking on a featured snippet opens up that page and scrolls down the page, taking the Searcher to the section on the page where that information resides. Because they appear at the very top of the page, some SEOs feel that you should always optimize for them. Our guide on how to get to Google's position zero covers that in depth.

But that's not always the best approach. If the snippet contains all the information to a specific question, Searchers won't be motivated to click on the result and you may end up losing traffic. Zero-click results like these are a big part of why organic traffic has become harder to predict.

So, you need to evaluate this on a term-by-term basis. Google gives you three snippet controls:

  • nosnippet is a robots meta tag that stops Google from showing a text snippet or video preview for the page. A static image thumbnail may still appear.
  • max-snippet:[number] limits the text snippet to that many characters. Setting it to 0 is the same as nosnippet. It doesn't limit the structured data Google uses for rich results.
  • data-nosnippet is an HTML attribute you add to a span, div, or section element to keep that part of the page out of snippets, while the rest of the page stays eligible.
<meta name="robots" content="max-snippet:50">

<div data-nosnippet>This text won't appear in a snippet.</div>

These controls no longer stop at the blue links. Google applies them to AI Overviews and AI Mode too: nosnippet prevents your content from being used as a direct input for those features, and max-snippet limits how much of it can be. That makes snippet controls a trade-off. Every restriction that protects a click also reduces how much of your page Google's AI features can quote.

For pages that you don't want to get a featured snippet, a low max-snippet value makes them less likely to appear as one. It doesn't guarantee that Google will stop showing a featured snippet for the page. The only way to achieve that is nosnippet, but that also blocks regular snippets.

Although you can prevent a page from appearing as a featured snippet, you can't mark a page as one. Only Google's systems can decide whether a page makes a good featured snippet.

Having said that, there are some ways you can optimize for featured snippets. Since Google doesn't show a featured snippet for every search term, it's hard to be proactive in optimizing. Instead, the typical approach is to find content that already ranks well on the first page of the SERP for a query that has a featured snippet.

Take a look at the featured snippet and see how to adapt your content. For example, if the snippet contains a list, check if your post has one. If not, then create one, placing it toward the beginning of the page. If the snippet is a definition, make sure to include a definition near the beginning of your post.

Sometimes Google displays links below a listing in the organic result. Often you'll see this occurring with branded search terms.

Sitelinks exist to help Searchers quickly navigate to the most useful information on your site and are automatically determined by Google. They take up a lot of real estate in the SERP and are one reason SEOs try to obtain them.

Although you can't control their display, there are a few best practices to follow:

  • Use informative, relevant, and concise text in titles, headings, and internal link anchor text
  • Avoid repetitive text
  • Create a logical and well-defined site structure with clear navigation

A favicon in Google Search is a graphic image or icon that Google can display next to your site's name and URL in search results. Favicons also display in a browser tab. They're small, but having a favicon helps with branding, so as usual it's important to pay attention to the details.

Here are Google's favicon guidelines to make sure yours can display:

  • Make sure the favicon is square (a 1:1 aspect ratio) and at least 8×8 pixels. Google recommends going larger than 48×48 pixels.
  • Use a supported format: BMP, GIF, ICO, PNG, JPEG, PPM, or TIFF.
  • Reference it with a <link rel="icon"> tag in your home page's <head>, and don't block Google from crawling either the home page or the favicon file.
  • Keep the favicon URL stable and use an icon that visually represents your brand.

Even when you follow every guideline, Google doesn't guarantee that it will show your favicon, and a change can take several days to several weeks to appear.

There are two opposing opinions on showing the post date. Those in favor believe that displaying the date helps Searchers determine how recent the information is, leading to greater click-throughs. Opponents believe that evergreen content doesn't need frequent updating and thus showing the date could be detrimental. Given the choice, Searchers prefer more recent content. We dig into the trade-offs in our post on when to show dates on blog posts.

You can provide the publication and last update date and Google will show that information if it's considered useful to Searchers. But Google doesn't rely on that alone to estimate the publication or update dates. Their systems examine multiple factors "because all factors can be prone to issues." I think that's Googlespeak for "manipulated."

The guidelines are simple:

  1. Feature the date prominently on the page making sure visitors can see it, and label it clearly with text like "Published" or "Last updated."
  2. Use structured data to specify the dates. WordPress plugins like RankMath and Yoast SEO take care of this automatically. Otherwise, use the Article, BlogPosting, or VideoObject subtype along with the datePublished and dateModified fields. Make sure the dates in your structured data match the ones visitors see.

How Does Google Use Image Metadata?

Google uses metadata for Google image search and reverse image search. Google relies heavily on text to understand images, and metadata provides additional information that can help the search engine properly index images and ultimately rank them in search results.

Google Images reveals IPTC metadata in search results when available. This metadata provides proper attribution using defined fields such as creator, credit line, and copyright notice. Google's documentation on image metadata in Google Images shows which fields it reads and how they appear.

The first rule in image SEO is to reduce the image file size. Some image compression software provides the opportunity to remove metadata at the same time. Note that in some jurisdictions this may be illegal as you're removing image copyright and licensing information. For that reason I recommend keeping this metadata. It takes up little space and the real gains come from compressing the image data itself.

You may have heard of the term Exif data in relation to image metadata. It refers to image data like the camera used, date, copyright, and caption. IPTC metadata is the data contained in the image. WordPress and Mac prefer IPTC photo metadata but will fall back to Exif photo metadata.

The Takeaway

While Google is the ultimate arbiter of how information gets displayed in its SERP, there's a certain amount of control that you can exercise. And that control now reaches further than the blue links. The titles, snippet controls, structured data, and dates you set shape how AI Overviews and other answer engines read, quote, and credit your pages. Treat them as one system, and pair them with content that's easy to extract. Our guide on how to structure content for answer engines explains how. So take advantage of that opportunity!