Breadcrumbs in SEO: Definition, Benefits & How to Create It

Breadcrumbs are one of the important parts of making a user-friendly website. By implementing these navigation features in your website, you can improve user experience and SEO performance. To begin with these features, you must first know what breadcrumbs websites are and how to implement them.

Let’s go to a deeper explanation about what is breadcrumb, its benefits, types, and how to implement it on your website by reading the following article till the end!

What Is Breadcrumb?

Breadcrumbs is the navigation feature on a website that links directly to specific pages containing related information. This feature is also displayed in search results and looks like Home > Blog > Category > Articles.

The purpose of this navigational feature is to help users find what they are looking for on your website and also to help search engines understand your site structure and the path to crawl your site. 

Breadcrumb in SEO is mutually beneficial, where these navigational features can lead to better user experience and improve technical aspects of websites resulting in more chances to rank higher on search engine results (SERP).

Benefits of Breadcrumbs

Breadcrumb can be very beneficial to your websites, that’s why you can find many professional websites using this feature. But, do you know what are the benefits of breadcrumbs? Here are some of them:

• Make your website user-friendly.
• Keep users onsite longer.
• Improve your website linking.
• Increase the website user experience.
• Reduce bounce rate.
• Increase your website ranking.
• Increase mobile experience.

Types of Breadcrumbs

Breadcrumbs websites that are commonly used can be divided into three types, each with its own purpose. You can choose the most suitable types of breadcrumbs websites you want to implement, including:

1. Hierarchy-based Breadcrumbs

This type of navigation feature is the most commonly used on websites. It shows where are you on a site and how many steps you should take to return to the homepages. For example, Home > Blog > Category > Articles > Post Name.

2. Attribute-based Breadcrumbs

Different from hierarchy-based, this attribute-based navigation feature is usually seen on e-commerce sites that show the footprint of product attributes. For example, Home > Category > Gender > Colour > Size. 

3. History-based Breadcrumbs

This type of navigational feature tells you what you have done before on websites like the history bar. For example, Home > Previous Page > Current Page.

How to Create Breadcrumbs

After understanding the benefits and types of breadcrumbs websites, you may want to know the steps to implement them on your site. To create SEO-friendly breadcrumbs, here are some steps you can take:

1. Add Require Properties

The first thing you need to do is add the required properties. You can start by choosing the types of breadcrumbs websites you want to use and customise them to your relevant parts of pages. 

You can add these breadcrumbs websites using CMS and installing plugins. This way, you can configure and style them to match your website's design.

2. Follow Google’s Guidelines

The next step you should do is follow Google’s guidelines related to these navigational features to avoid errors in implementation and penalties. 

Google has specific requirements for this navigational feature that helps to understand better and categorise your website's contents. So, make sure to check the guidelines regularly. 

3. Validate Your Breadcrumbs

Validating your breadcrumbs websites is a very important step to make sure that there are no critical errors. You can use the Rich Result Test to check if there are any problems or critical errors and fix them immediately to optimise the implementation of these features on your websites.

4. Test with URL Inspection Tool

Next on how to create breadcrumbs is to test them using URL Inspection tools. You can try publishing a few pages categorised by breadcrumbs' websites and use the URL inspection tool to check how search engines like Google see and understand them.

Remember to also check that your pages are not blocked by noindex tags, robot.txt, or login requirements.

5. Submit Your Sitemap

Last but not least, you also need to keep Google updated with your website changes. Thus, you should submit your sitemap to the Google Search Console. If you want to automate this, you can also use Search Console Sitemaps API.

Conclusion

Breadcrumbs websites is a useful navigation feature that can help you increase your SEO website performance by providing a structured and easy-to-navigate display. Many website businesses have already implemented this feature as an effective SEO strategy to reduce bounce rates and maximise their user experience.

However, implementing breadcrumbs effectively requires specialised skills and expertise. With that being said, if you need expert assistance to implement breadcrumbs or other SEO strategies you can rely on SEO Services by cmlabs. 

In cmlabs, we have professional and experienced SEO teams that can help maximise your SEO performance to increase website traffic and conversion rate, which accordingly improves your business growth. Contact our marketing team today and get a free consultation!