What are Breadcrumbs in SEO?

SEO Breadcrumb Types

There are a number of different breadcrumbs, though most of them fall into the following:

• Path breadcrumbs – represent paths that users could use to reach a specific page. This requires numerous breadcrumbs leading to the same page
• Location breadcrumbs – trace back through different layers within the website. This enables visitors to visit a page hosting similar pages
• Keyword breadcrumbs – works similar to location breadcrumbs, using unique identifiers such as attributes or keywords.

The common places you will find breadcrumbs is on e-commerce sites and technical support pages. It is also important to remember that when you have duplicate breadcrumbs, which you will see with path and keyword breadcrumbs, it can negatively impact your SEO efforts. If you see this when implementing breadcrumbs, focus on location breadcrumbs instead.

SEO Breadcrumbs Benefits

Breadcrumbs guide users and search engines, helping them identify how your website works, while boosting user experience:

• Helps visitors understand your website layout
• They are optional and do not overwhelm visitors that choose not to use them
• Provide users with an easy way to scan your website, viewing more content, in a shorter period of time.
• Easily implemented

While breadcrumbs improve navigation and boost user experience (UX), they also improve your SEO:

• Use them to point keywords to certain pages, helping search engine crawlers identify how one page relates to the other
• Improve internal links on your websites, boosting your off-page SEO efforts
• You can use schema markup to describe them, enabling search engines to understand what their crawlers are looking for. 

Tips to Optimising Breadcrumbs in SEO

When it comes to optimising for keywords, you should follow a basic structure that includes a link to your home page >main keyword followed by category keyword< , providing a main keyword and secondary keyword describing the page the visitor is currently on.

Not all breadcrumbs perform well. There are things you can do to ensure your breadcrumbs are beneficial to visitors and search engines:

• Do not only rely on breadcrumbs – do not replace vital website components, such as internal linking and navigation, with breadcrumbs. Use breadcrumbs as an addition to your website, enhancing your SEO efforts
• Breadcrumbs are used to describe hierarchy  - do not use them if you only have pages listed under one or two categories
• Do not use your breadcrumbs as a replacement for the back button
• Breadcrumbs guide visitors – they should be used to provide easy access to closely related website pages, over one or more categories
• They need to be accessible, in a prominent place on your site. This helps visitors quickly identify that they are there, while allowing search engine crawlers to recognise the breadcrumbs and see them as valuable

Conclusion

Breadcrumbs are valuable SEO techniques that provide easy and seamless navigation throughout your website for your website visitors and search engine crawlers. They are an additional technique that enhances your internal links and website navigation.