BreadCrumb, SEO and Google > Types and Strategies
A few days back while surfing the web I came upon an interesting statement. Someone said that “Website is not a house that people can just enter from the door. For website people can enter from any where either through windows, walls, sewer system, chimney etc. Thus if you are able to control the navigation of the site which is helpful to the visitors, then you surely will reap fruitful results from the site.”
The best way to check the site is making sure that the visitors are able to freely navigate the site no matter through which page they landed. They must know where they are currently and can easily find way to other pages. For huge websites, breadcrumbs can be used to make the site navigation friendly to the visitors.
Below are some of the interesting facts that one must know about breadcrumbs:
Types of breadcrumbs:
- Location Based: Home Page >> Section Name >> Category name >> Page name – Page description. The format of this type of breadcrumb is as shown in the link above. It shows the visitor the location of the current page relevant to the whole structure of the website.
Eg. Electronics>>Goods/Services>>Auto Electronics>>Car Stereos
- Path Based: this is basically a dynamic one. It helps visualize the path through which the user landed on current page. Using this single page can be reached in many ways. This creates a duplicate content and confuses the user.
Eg. Consulting > Services > Implementation > Service A
Consulting > Services > Optimization > Service A
Consulting > Services > Upgrade > Service A
- Attribute Based: This is a simple one and shows attributes to a current page.
Eg. Online Shopping>Electronics>Computers,Hardware & Softwares>Computer>Dell
Keyword Optimized Breadcrumbs: Many webmasters use breadcrumbs as one of the mean to stuff the site with keywords. May be for some it is pleasing but on an average you must try to avoid the overdose of keywords in your site. Just remember the two important points.
- Never make the extra use of keywords in the anchor text that you use on the page.
- And make the usability of the site before the SEO. You must take care the site is easy to navigate to the visitors. Because they know what “Home” link means, so don’t prompt them to make any guesses using some keyword name instead of home link. Stick to the standards.
Breadcrumbs and Google: It is found that Google also has started integrating the breadcrumbs in the search engine results shown. Many people like it. But it is still a question where to place the breadcrumb so that it would be easy for search engine spiders to locate the page and display in relevant to the search found.
Tips to use breadcrumbs:
- Never add a breadcrumb just for the sake of adding. If it is a huge site then use keeping the visitor perspective in mind. Just for the sake of SEO don’t do it.
- Always the last page shown in breadcrumb must be unlinked. Don’t make a circle linking the last page to itself.
- Always treat main navigation and the breadcrumb separately. Main navigation are generally shown vertically on the site with categories and other content and breadcrumbs are shown horizontally.
- Make effective use of breadcrumb on your site, this will help the user to get familiar to the website faster.
- Never use a breadcrumb in the page title. It creates a wrong impression as it is longer, non relevant and untargeted.
Thus it seems that now many webmaster would be having sufficient knowledge about the breadcrumbs and would be using it in an effective and efficient manner to make browsing of the site to user faster and more friendly, also adding to the SEO value of the site.