Why are breadcrumbs important?

All websites and ecommerces that aim to improve their ranking in Google and optimize the user experience should use breadcrumbs.

This system is organized by keywords and consists of structured navigation that works like a trail of information provided by the customers from the moment they access the homepage.

 

The breadcrumbs trail

 

The concept of the breadcrumb trail refers to the Hansel and Gretel fairy tale, in which the main characters create a trail of breadcrumbs in order to track back to their house. They form a navigation system divided into categories within a website.

It allows users to understand their exact location and journey within the page via the navigation link or URL.

Another critical aspect of the breadcrumb study is that the user can easily return to the previous page and be certain of the navigation path. 

 

What are breadcrumbs for, and who should use them?

 

Back to the breadcrumbs example, you can think of it as a way to keep the visitor from getting lost within the website navigation.

They also improve usability, as the user can find the pages they want more quickly and save time, which contributes to reducing the abandonment rate. Therefore, websites that have many pages also use breadcrumbs to improve their SEO.

Blogs with editorial content and online stores that sort products by category, offering customer service and a space dedicated to the shopping cart, for example, can benefit from this structured navigation. More action with fewer clicks.

 

How breadcrumbs benefit business

 

Breadcrumbs improve the user experience and facilitate navigation with fewer clicks and actions, making the site more attractive to new readers or consumers. It is also an excellent ally for those who want to reach the top of Google page rankings, as it ensures that search engines read the entire site structure and find the page that needs tracking. 

 

Breadcrumbs can also help improve click-through rates (CTR) and do not affect page loading time in any way, which is important for users. 

 

The types of breadcrumbs

 

The main types of breadcrumbs were created based on three factors to categorize information: location, attribute, and path. Here is how the system works with each of them.

 

Location based

Location breadcrumbs are the most widely known and show users where they are when navigating the website hierarchy. They provide the user with information on what they are looking for on the site.

 

Attribute based

The navigation paths configured in attribute breadcrumbs show both the user and search engines the properties of the items displayed on the page. In other words, they provide meta-information for each piece of content on the page, whether it is an image, subtitle, review, or comment. 

 

Path based

Path breadcrumbs are also easy to identify, as they consider the user’s entire path to the main page. They track the user’s path from the beginning of the navigation.

 

How to create breadcrumbs?

 

Before creating breadcrumbs, the website owner needs to be fully aware of how the site’s navigability works and the goals they want to achieve with this tool.

It is essential to understand the user’s path on the website to find what they want, as breadcrumbs’ expected outcomes are to facilitate the user experience. It is also important to pay attention to a search engines’ request, which usually searches pages through keywords.

Therefore, according to keywords relevant to the business, breadcrumbs should be created from the site’s categorization and subcategorization. This way, you can create the breadcrumb HTML code that will be attached to the page.

The website administrators often use forward slashes (/) or a greater-than sign (>) to make it easier to identify categories and subcategories. So, the user can not only identify where they are according to the URL, but they can also see their path at the top of the website, as in the example below:

 

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Remember that breadcrumbs are meant to facilitate user navigation and help search engines understand the website’s content and relevance to the public. It is important that you consider all the highlighted topics in order to obtain satisfactory results for your website or ecommerce.