Breadcrumbs in SEO: Definition & Tips for Web Structure

As a website owner, you must want to ensure your visitors get the best user experience possible. To achieve this, one of the best things you can do is provide a seamless navigation experience for your users. 

In this case, breadcrumbs are a great way to help your users navigate your site and find the content they need quickly and easily. Therefore, let’s find out what breadcrumbs are, how they benefit you, and how to create them. Read on to learn more!

What Is Breadcrumb?

Breadcrumbs are text links that appear at the top of your page. This is a navigational tool that is used to help users find their way around your website when they are looking for specific pages. The breadcrumb trail shows users the path they have taken to get to the current page.

Look at the breadcrumbs example below:

This trails users through the different pages and shows them where they are on the site and where they can go to reach the previous page they were on. Every step is a clickable link that can take the users to the previous page without using the back button on their browser.

Breadcrumbs also appear in the SERPs, which are located below the title and above the description. This allows users to get a quick overview of the page’s hierarchy without having to click through to the page itself. 

There is a fun fact about how the term ‘breadcrumbs’ came to be. This originated from the Hansel and Gretel fairytale, where Hansel left a trail of breadcrumbs behind to help them find their way back in case they were lost. The idea of breadcrumbs in the story gave birth to the term we use today.

Benefits of Using Breadcrumbs

Breadcrumbs are beneficial for both users and SEO. Not only do they help users get to their intended destination easily, but they are also an important part of the website architecture that helps search engines understand your site structure. Let’s take a deeper look at how breadcrumbs can benefit your site:

• Improving user experience (UX). Breadcrumb is a user-friendly navigation tool that helps users ‘walk’ through each page easily and quickly. Thus, they improve the UX and make the browsing experience more pleasant for users.
• Engage users on your website longer. By using breadcrumbs, you can encourage users to explore your website further, reducing the likelihood of them bouncing. This can lead to longer session durations and lower bounce rates, which are both positive signals for search engines.
• Enhancing internal linking. Google uses internal links to determine the correlation between each page. By implementing breadcrumbs in SEO, you can improve the internal linking of your website and help search engines to better understand your website structure.
• Rich snippets on SERPs. As mentioned above, breadcrumbs provide rich snippets on Google search results. These snippets can be a powerful tool to improve your click-through rates by providing a concise and clear breadcrumbs trail that makes your search results look more appealing.

Types of Breadcrumbs

Just as Hansel and Gretel rely on the breadcrumbs trail to find their way back, users can also navigate your website easily with the help of digital breadcrumbs. 

These digital trails come in 3 common types, each offering unique benefits. Here are several forms of breadcrumbs you should know.

1. Hierarchy-Based Breadcrumbs

Hierarchy-based or location-based breadcrumbs are the most common type, which informs the users of their current location on your website. This type of breadcrumb shows the hierarchy of your website structure and usually starts the path using the homepage of your website. 

Here is what hierarchy-based breadcrumbs look like, taken from the cmlabs website: 

2. Attribute-Based Breadcrumbs

Attribute-based breadcrumbs are a bit more complex than the hierarchy-based type. This is because attribute-based breadcrumbs generate a dynamic trail based on the attributes or filters the users specify when searching for a particular product or information on your website. 

Look at the example of attribute-based breadcrumbs taken from the eBay website below:

Note that when the trails get too long, it will be truncated to show only the homepage and the last three attributes to make the breadcrumbs website design look clean and not overcrowded.

3. Path-Based Breadcrumbs

Lastly, the path-based breadcrumbs is a navigation tool that shows the unique path that a user takes to get to the page they are on. It’s rather different from the two types of breadcrumbs earlier as it traces the actual path the user took. It works just like a browser history.

For example, a user reads two articles on a website. Then, the breadcrumbs would look like this: 

However, this kind of breadcrumbs may confuse the users as they might reach the same page through different paths, leading to a varying breadcrumbs trail.

How to Create Breadcrumbs?

Breadcrumbs should be designed to be displayed effectively both on the web page and the search engine results pages (SERPs). Therefore, read the following step-by-step guide carefully to ensure that your breadcrumbs are displayed properly.

1. Breadcrumbs Elements for Web Page

You can use basic HTML and CSS to create breadcrumbs that are visible to the users on top of your web page. 

To do this, start by using HTML to craft the links. Organise these links in an unordered list ( <ul> ) to structure the links, where each link in the breadcrumb trail is represented by a list item ( <li> ). The final list item will display the current page the users are on. Look at the HTML template provided by HubSpot to see how this is done.

Note that you also need to style the HTML to make it look like a breadcrumbs trail using CSS.  You can set the font display, colour, and separator by writing it in the HTML code above. Insert some CSS style into the HTML code that you created earlier using the HubSpot template.

By combining HTML and CSS code, you can create a simple breadcrumb navigation to use on any website. You can look at the final result below the template, which looks like this:

2. Breadcrumbs Snippets for SERPs

Not only do you need to display the breadcrumbs on the web page, but you also need to make them visible in the search results. This is important as it allows search engines to better understand your website and display your breadcrumbs on the SERPs, known as rich snippets.

To create breadcrumbs snippets, it is essential to build structured data that involves specific HTML and schema markup. Here is how to do it:

1. Insert the required properties. Determine which structured data formats are relevant to your content. Be it JSON-LD format, microdata format, or RDF format. Based on the format you are using, learn where you can insert structured data into your website. If you are using CMS, simplify the process using an integrated plugin. If you are using JavaScript, you must insert the code directly.
2. Comply with the guidelines. When creating structured data, follow the Google guidelines. If there are structured data issues, such as it is not representative of the content or is hidden from the user, it will result in manual action that will negatively impact your eligibility for rich snippets.
3. Validate Your Code. Use the Rich Results Test to validate your code and fix any critical errors. You can also fix the non-critical errors that may be flagged in the tool, though it is not a necessary condition to acquire rich snippets.
4. Launch a Few Pages. Deploy a few pages with the structured data and see how Google sees your page using the URL Inspection tool. Be sure to make the page accessible for Google to crawl and not restricted by a robots.txt file, the noindex tag, or login requirements.
5. Submit a Sitemap. This step is important to inform Google of future changes. You can automate the process by using the Search Console Sitemap API.

Conclusion

Understanding breadcrumbs is important for every website owner, as it will allow them to make the most of their site. Using breadcrumbs helps users navigate through your site and increase the user experience effectively.

However, you may find that creating breadcrumbs is not as easy as you thought it would be. The code is complicated and requires you to have a good understanding of HTML. Therefore, you can consider working with professionals to ensure that your breadcrumbs are well-built and functional.

SEO Services by cmlabs is ready to assist you in overcoming the challenges of building a website that is SEO friendly using the best practices and techniques, including the use of breadcrumbs. Our team is composed of skilled professionals who will make sure that your website is compliant with the latest SEO.

Let’s see how breadcrumbs can help you achieve your goals. Contact our marketing team today for a free consultation to discuss your business needs!