The fairy tale Hansel and Gretel was likely the first place most people heard of breadcrumbs being used as a marker to avoided being lost in a dark thicket with little more than a few rays of light to light the main characters’ paths.
Although breadcrumbs didn’t work out so well in Hansel and Gretel due to the fact that the birds ate them, they work exceedingly well in helping visitors and search engine robots from getting lost while wading through your website.
Not only do they make your website more accessible, but they also have some implications to your SEO that may prove beneficial enough to take the small amount of time required to implement breadcrumbs.
Let’s explore the different types of breadcrumbs, how you might use them and their various implications in terms of how they might prove beneficial to your SEO efforts.
Breadcrumbs allow a user to retrace their steps from your home page to the page that they’re currently viewing.
They can reflect the structure of your website, a logical path or attributes of the current page.
When used properly, they can add context to the innermost of your pages while reducing many of the factors that might negatively affect your site’s SEO, such as your bounce rate.
While there are many variations of breadcrumbs, they generally fall into one of the three following types:
1. Location Breadcrumbs – These are breadcrumbs that trace back through the different layers of your website. Following one of these breadcrumbs will allow users to visit a page that plays host to similar pages in the same category.An example would be: Home > Law > Finances > Bankruptcy Information.
2. Path Breadcrumbs – This type of breadcrumb represents the various logical paths that a user could use to reach a page.
That means multiple breadcrumbs can lead to the same page.
3. Attribute or Keyword Breadcrumbs – Breadcrumbs of this nature follow a similar path as described by location breadcrumbs.
The difference is that instead of using something like the page title or another unique identifier, keywords and attributes that describe the page are used.
Technical support pages and e-commerce websites are two of the more common places where this breadcrumb is used.
The last two types of bread crumbs can result in duplicate breadcrumbs, which may have a negative impact on how search engines interpret your website’s SEO attempts.
If this is the case, then opt for location-based breadcrumbs.
Breadcrumbs are an essential part of helping users understand how your website works.
They encourage positive actions, such as delving deeper into your website to look for other pages that will likely interest them in some way.
When users undergo such positive actions, they reduce the negative factors like your website’s bounce rate.
This helps your pages rank higher in SERPs.
Despite their numerous benefits for visitors, breadcrumbs have a number of advantages when it comes to search engines.
They pass on context to the inner and outer pages of your website in a natural and logical way that search engines love.
Optimizing your breadcrumbs for SEO is a tedious balancing act.
Too much optimization can result in over-optimization penalties, but there is no real penalty for “under-optimizing” so long as your breadcrumb structure remains intelligent.
A link to your home page using your website’s main keyword > Your main keyword followed by a category keyword > Your main keyword with a keyword that describes the page the user is on
As discussed earlier, it may be advantageous to omit certain parts to avoid over-optimizing.
For example, it’s fine to just leave the category part as a single keyword or phrase that describes the category.
Not all breadcrumbs are created equally, nor do they all perform as well.
Below is a small list of tips that will help you ensure your breadcrumbs are friendly towards both users and search engines.
Breadcrumbs are a useful navigational feature that encourages users to browse more of your site. This is especially important if your website has a complex hierarchy that may dissuade users from delving deeper into it, even if the first page they land on from a search engine is one that they like.
Breadcrumbs also give search engines clues about the structure of your website and make your overall SEO efforts more effective.
Furthermore, implementing breadcrumbs should be easy if your pages have a dynamic delivery system in place.
With all the benefits to the usability of your website that they bring, there’s no reason that you shouldn’t use them.