What are website breadcrumbs and how are they helpful in SEO?
Breadcrumbs are navigational aids or signboards that not only help visitors determine their location on a website but they also help determine Google how structured a site is. It makes sense to add these SEO essentials to websites.
Let’s see how SEO breadcrumbs help websites
What are SEO breadcrumbs?
Technically speaking, they are texts. A breadcrumb is a small piece of text matter often located on top of a page. Take it as a path to your home page and find it in the form of Home > Software > WordPress Plugins > Yoast SEO for WordPress. The text matter shows where you are on your website and its advantage is that it is clickable to the homepage.
You can see breadcrumbs on Google results. Add correct form of structured data to your site for search engines to pick-up the data and show it in the result pages. The results you see about your site are breadcrumbs of your site. Visitors can easily see where the site sits on result pages and they can follow the breadcrumbs to visit home page of your site.
Types of SEO breadcrumbs
The breadcrumbs can be classified into three broad categories:
- Hierarchy bases breadcrumbs
As suggested by the name, the text matter shows way to Home Page. The results show how many steps are you from the Home Page. For instance take Home>Blog>Category>Post Name. It is visible that you are on a blogpost and three steps away from the Home Page. These are the most common and most often popping breadcrumbs
- Attribute based breadcrumbs
When you search a product on an ecommerce site, you read the page like Home>Product Category>Gender>Size>Color. Here gender, size and colors are used as attributes for the product searched hence attribute based breadcrumbs. These appear more on e-commerce sites and only when a search is made.
- History based breadcrumbs
History of the past searches enable visitors find the pages they visited earlier. It would appear as Home Page>Previous Page>Previous Page>Previous Page>Current Page. The link shows how many steps you are from the Home Page.
Advantages of SEO breadcrumbs
Nothing is useless in SEO and breadcrumbs are very useful for highlighting websites and directing visitors to the Home Page. Here’re some of the biggest advantages of the breadcrumbs.
- Google likes breadcrumbs
Breadcrumbs are for visitors but Google also loves these leftovers. Reason for Google liking the breadcrumbs is it gets details about structured data of websites from them. Also Google shows them in its search results. This way, the search patterns become more interesting for the visitors.
- SEO breadcrumbs enhance user experience
Visitors hate getting lost in the search results and forget their way out. While clicking back is a way to come out but it is time-consuming. On the contrary, SEO breadcrumbs help visitors stay connected to their search and return back to the main page within a few clicks.
- Lower bounce rate
Breadcrumbs are like threads that help visitors find information. They know which page they are visiting and how far the home page is. Today, Google gives organic results that is the visitors can enter into your site from any page but you can take them to home page through breadcrumbs. In other words, you can help visitors browse through your web pages instead of going back to Google.
Conclusion
With SEO breadcrumbs, you can help your visitors stay connected to your website. They won’t get lost in the heap of search results and return back to the home page of your site to start searching information instead of asking Google for more results.
