When you hear the mention of breadcrumbs you might think we’re about to share our latest favourite recipe with you, but in fact breadcrumbs is also the term for a web and digital ingredient that can make your website more accessible and help your search engine optimisation (SEO) efforts.
While breadcrumbs help your site visitors understand the layout of your business website and quickly scan your content, they also deliver a number of benefits in relation to search engines, including:
- Helping to improve the internal linking structure of your website and allowing search engines to understand how one page relates to another by pointing to keywords on your website
- Search engines such as Google can also understand that their robots are looking at breadcrumbs and display them in a search engine result page (SERP) which can then result in more users getting to browse other pages on your website and not just your homepage.
If you’d like to see what breadcrumbs look like, you can scroll up to the top of this page to see:
3 Types of Breadcrumbs that Can Benefit your SEO
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Location Breadcrumbs
Location-based breadcrumbs help a site visitor understand where the page they are on stands in relation to the hierarchy of your website and allows them to visit a web page that plays host to similar pages in that same category. These work well on websites that have more than two levels of content, so as your site visitor browses more of your website they are provided with links to pages that act as a parent such as your Homepage being the parent to your Our Services page.
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Attribute Breadcrumbs
Also known as keyword breadcrumbs, this type of breadcrumbs is along a similar line to location breadcrumbs. The difference is that rather than using a page title or other unique identifier, keywords and attributes are used instead to describe the page and point out to the user the categories attributed to the current page within a website. Common uses for attribute breadcrumbs are eCommerce websites and Technical Support pages.
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Path Breadcrumbs
As the name suggests, this type of breadcrumb represents the various logical steps or path a user has to take to arrive at a particular page of your website, meaning that multiple path breadcrumbs can lead to the same page. This type of breadcrumbs is the least popular of the three online, as they provide a similar functionality to the forward and back buttons on a browser.
Breadcrumbs Best Practice Dos and Don’ts
- DO try to use breadcrumbs consistently
- DO use breadcrumbs when they help a user
- DON’T link the current page to itself
- DON’T use breadcrumbs in the page <title> tag
- DON’T use breadcrumbs to replace main navigation
For great SEO advice and a business website that users can easily navigate, speak to the Web & Digital team at Kwik Kopy today.
