It used to be that you did what you could with your page title, hoped for the best in terms of DMOZ description, and those two things combined to create your result in a SERP.
While the page title is still massively important in terms of how your page will appear in a SERP, the rest of the listing has several new aspects to capitalize on.
Breadcrumbs
The last line in a page’s listing is, most often, simply the URL of that page. However, depending on how well developed your site is, that URL may be long, unwieldy, and (for the most part) not useful in terms of indicating to a user where that page lives within the site. To help solve this, Google has begun to include visual breadcrumbs (often used as a secondary navigation on blogs, forums, etc.) in individual SERP listings.
4+ Line Descriptions
When users search extremely long-tail phrases (6+ words), Google often has a pretty good idea of what that user is looking for. Therefore it is able to display fewer, more detailed results. One of the outcomes of this is longer descriptions. See below for an example of several 4-line descriptions.
Inline Sitelinks
Sitelinks have been around for a while, often reserved for the #1 result in any given search (assuming adequate authority). However, Google has now begun including inline sitelinks in several results on a SERP. You can see below that ESPN, while not necessarily ranking #1 for [nhl hockey results], does still have enough authority (and a properly coded site) to allow Google to display 4 inline links to other related pages deep in the site.
Sublink Clusters
Finally, while there is no ‘official’ name for these links, what are commonly being referred to as sublink clusters have begun to appear. Typically assigned to blog, news, and forum sites, these 4-6 results live below the standard listing and provide several deep links to related articles or posts.
These updates to SERPs make it easier for users to get deeper into a site directly from search results pages and prove, once again, that the SERP has become the new home page.
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