Better SEO ranking is the ultimate goal of all SEO activities performed over a website. The SEO of a website depends on a number of factors including keywords, links, content, and so on. One such trending term that is playing a significant role in improving the SEO of a website and aiding digital marketing experts to reach their goals is – breadcrumbs. 

This article aims to detail you the basics of breadcrumbs as well as introducing you to – how does it impact your SEO. Let us commence with the introduction of breadcrumbs.

What are breadcrumbs?

Breadcrumbs are the links that enable you to back track your path right from the page you are visiting to the homepage of the website. The idea of breadcrumbs originated from the popular children’s story of Hansel and Gretel in which Hansal dropped pieces of bread all the way to protect himself and his sister from losing the way and finding his way back home. 

Breadcrumbs are emerging as an important aspect to develop user-friendly and SEO optimized websites. They are generally positioned near to the top of the website pages and every link given across the path is clickable, helping visitors to go back to the previous pages

Categories of breadcrumbs:

Breadcrumbs are of multiple types, however, the ultimate goal of each type is to help visitors in understanding the correlation between the current page with other website pages. Let’s have a look at its types in brief

1. Hierarchy/Location-based breadcrumbs:-

These types of breadcrumbs provide information to the users about where they are in the website structure and how far they are from the homepage. This can be better explained by looking at the image below.

2. Dynamic/Attribute-based breadcrumbs

These types of breadcrumbs are mainly composed of product attributes and are mostly observed in the eCommerce sites.

3. History-based breadcrumbs

These breadcrumbs are created on the basis of the website pages a visitor has toured. The utilization of this kind of breadcrumbs is not a great SEO practice and should be avoided.

Primary advantages of utilizing breadcrumbs on a website

Utilizing breadcrumbs into a website can avail you of an ample number of advantages including the following

1. Improved Usability

Breadcrumbs improve the usability of your website by aiding users to better understand the layout and structure of your website. This raises the possibility of retaining website users for a long time as they can navigate across the pages with ease.

2. Faster Navigation

Breadcrumbs enable website visitors to speed up the visualization of the pages as users have direct access to the back and forth links.

3. Enhanced Website Ranking

Breadcrumbs not only please the visitors of the website but also delight Google by aiding it to understand the structure of your website which results in an elevated website ranking.

How breadcrumbs impact the SEO of your website

Breadcrumbs are an important factor that can help the SEO of your website in a number of ways. A few of them can be seen as under

• Breadcrumbs aid in strengthening the internal linking structure of your website.
• Breadcrumbs help search engines in determining the correlation across different website pages.
• Breadcrumbs are a great supporter to enhance your SEO score and drive more traffic towards your website.

Effective ways to optimize breadcrumbs for an improved SEO

Just including breadcrumbs into a website is not enough to improve the SEO of your website, in fact, there are some prominent practices that you need to follow to guarantee the desired outcomes. Here we go

• Breadcrumbs should never be used in the page title.
• An accurate and complete navigation path should be included in the breadcrumbs as bounces may lead to confusion and create hurdles for the user.
• Breadcrumbs should be used at the top of the website pages.
• Breadcrumbs should be used throughout the website and not just one or two pages.
• Breadcrumbs should not be linked to the current page.

Things to consider while implementing breadcrumbs into a Website

Undoubtedly, the implementation of breadcrumbs into a website can provide you a hell lot of benefits when it comes to user experience and SEO of the website, however, there are possibilities for breadcrumbs causing harm rather than benefits if you commit a few common mistakes. Let us discuss the most common things to consider while creating breadcrumbs

• Do check the font size of your breadcrumbs.Breadcrumbs fonts should not be too big in size, however, at the same time, they should not be too small, and should be easy to read across a range of devices including mobile devices.
• Breadcrumbs should be positioned in such a way that they are easier to observe and use. 
• Your breadcrumbs should not be a copy of your navigation bar, in fact, they should be used for additional purposes.
• Your breadcrumbs should not replace your navigation bar.
• The choice of breadcrumb type should be as per your website requirements.

Ways to implement breadcrumbs on a WordPress website

You can add breadcrumbs to your WordPress website in a number of ways. You can either use the Yoast SEO WordPress plugin that enables you to incorporate breadcrumbs into your website just by following a few easy steps. 

Second, you can use other WordPress plugins like Breadcrumb NavXT or any other allowing you to accomplish the task efficiently and effectively.

Third, you can utilize any WordPress theme like OceanWP having a built-in breadcrumb option along with them.

EndNote

Breadcrumbs are an important element that Google loves the most. They not only aid you to enhance the overall user experience but also permits visitors to check the website thoroughly. Hence, making effective use of breadcrumbs while developing your websites is highly recommended. 

Although the implementation of breadcrumbs into a WordPress website is quite an easy job but still if you find any hurdle and need assistance, Hire WordPress Developer to help. Good Luck!