Follow the Breadcrumb Trail to Better Search Results
Did you know that your website’s breadcrumb is an important facet of your search engine optimization strategy? Stop staring at your toast… those aren’t the crumbs I’m talking about. A website breadcrumb is a navigational aid that typically appears horizontally across the top of a web page. The deeper you navigate into a site, the larger your breadcrumb will become. In the beginning, this feature was included to help enhance the usability of a site. All this changed back in November however, as Google began rolling out the use of breadcrumbs in their global search results. Is your company website getting lost in search results? An updated breadcrumb could be just what you need to find your way to the top of the Google search results.
What is a Navigational Breadcrumb
Breadcrumbs are designed to provide website visitors with links back to each previous page that has been navigated through in order to get to the current page. For example, on this page, my breadcrumb reads “Home > All Blog Posts > Follow the Breadcrumb Trail to Better Search Results.” This simple little trail tells you exactly where you are on my website, and the most popular path to this location. There are three types of breadcrumbs commonly used in website navigation:
1) Path
Path breadcrumbs are dynamic. This means that every users breadcrumb will be different. A path breadcrumb shows the exact path a user has taken to arrive at a given page.
2) Location
The CIK Marketing website uses this type of static breadcrumb. This breadcrumb shows the location of a page in the website hierarchy.
3) Attribute
This navigational design gives information that categorizes the page that you are on.
What Google’s Doing with Breadcrumbs
Google started investigating breadcrumbs in the summer of 2009, displaying breadcrumbs in search engine results. By mid-November, Google announced that they would be including these navigational snippets in place of some URLs in their search results (see the below picture for a visual).
But not all URLS have been replaced with crumbs. Google has said that they would only insert a breadcrumb into their results if they felt that it would provide more context to the link.
The information in these hierarchies come from analyzing destination web pages. Google remarks that they made the change to their search results in order to get web searchers to “the information you’re looking for as quickly as possible… Sometimes that means improving how we represent websites, and other times that means giving you new ways to explore content.”
The Benefits of Building a Breadcrumb
Breadcrumbs will help your website perform better in search results, but more importantly, they will help improve the user experience on your Chatham-Kent company website. Studies have shown that users turn to breadcrumbs when the main navigation structure fails, increasing the time potential customers stay on your site. Breadcrumbs never cause problems during user testing, and they take up very little space on a page. Couple that with the SEO benefits of higher rankings and cleaner search engine result listings, and it’s easy to see why more and more web designers are including breadcrumbs on their websites.
Does your website have a breadcrumb? Do you rely on website breadcrumbs when surfing the net? Leave a comment and let CIK know how you navigate complex websites.
