Breadcrumb Navigation

The term ‘breadcrumb navigation’ refers to the small trail of links that you’ll often see near the top of a page and clearly shows where it sits within the structure of the website.

Taking the appearance of navigation bars, these breadcrumbs can differ depending on your website and its context but will generally carry the appearance of something like: Home > Services > Link Building.

Why the name breadcrumbs? The term comes from the tale of Hansel and Gretel, where breadcrumbs marked the path home. On the World Wide Web, breadcrumb navigation does the same job: they show visitors the route from the homepage to wherever they currently are on a website, allowing for an easy way to quickly retrace their steps.

Advantages of Breadcrumbs

When someone lands on pages nestled deep within the framework of your website, such as on a specific product page or service, breadcrumbs can help them to find their feet immediately.

This means that your leads will be able to quickly see the broader category the page belongs to and click up to it without having to forage through menus or hitting the back button.

For larger websites with plenty of nested pages, this provides a simple improvement to the overall experience for users, allowing visitors to stay longer and explore more content.

SEO Implications

Because every crumb offers its own internal link, a slick trail can allow your internal linking to become stronger as a whole. This helps Google to better understand how your pages are related to one another and how your authority can flow between them.

As a result, breadcrumbs reinforce your website’s relevance, which makes it far more clear when a group of articles belongs within the same category, for instance.

Search Advantages

There are clear search benefits to take into account as well. When you mark up breadcrumbs with the right structured data, search engines can display them within their results pages in place of the plain URL, which will help to show the page’s position within your site hierarchy.

This perk helps to make your listing clearer and more clickable in many cases, since it informs searchers where the page fits at a glance. Although this is a small improvement, it can really add up when implemented throughout your website.