Structured Data & Open Graph: Control How Your Pages Appear

Two behind-the-scenes pieces of markup decide how your pages look beyond the page itself: structured data controls how you appear in Google search, and Open Graph tags control how your links look when shared on social media. Neither is visible to visitors, but both strongly affect clicks.

What is structured data (JSON-LD)?

Structured data is a small script that describes your content in a machine-readable way. Google recommends the JSON-LD format — a block of JSON inside a <script type="application/ld+json"> tag in your page head. It makes a page eligible for rich results: FAQ drop-downs, star ratings, breadcrumbs, recipe cards and more.

Common schema types

• FAQPage — shows expandable questions under your result. Great for tool and help pages.
• Article — for blog posts and guides.
• Product — price, availability and ratings for shop pages.
• BreadcrumbList — shows your site hierarchy in the result.
• Organization — your brand details and logo.

Build any of these with the schema markup generator, then test the output in Google's Rich Results Test before publishing. Valid markup makes you eligible for rich results — Google still decides whether to show them.

What are Open Graph tags?

Open Graph (OG) tags tell Facebook, LinkedIn, Slack, WhatsApp and others what title, description and image to show when someone shares your link. Without them, platforms guess — often picking the wrong image or text. The core tags are og:title, og:description, og:image and og:url.

The image is what gets clicked

Use a 1200×630 pixel image (1.91:1) so it renders as a large, crisp card. X (Twitter) reads OG tags too, but you can fine-tune its card with a few twitter: tags. Generate and preview both with the Open Graph generator.

Don't forget the basics

Rich results and social cards build on a solid title and meta description. Write those with the meta tag generator, and confirm they won't be truncated using the SERP snippet checker, which measures the real pixel width Google uses.

A quick checklist

• Add JSON-LD for the most relevant schema type on each page.
• Validate it with the Rich Results Test.
• Add Open Graph tags with a 1200×630 image.
• Re-scrape the URL in the platform's sharing debugger to refresh cached previews.