SEO by Hansel & Gretel – Using Breadcrumbs for Search

Adding a breadcrumb navigation structure is a simple way to improve your website navigation and usability, and increase the “spider-ability” at the same time.   Google is now including breadcrumbs in the SERP’s, allowing a searcher to navigate directly to the page that most closely matches their search term.  This can help increase your click-through rate, lower your bounce rate, and possibly increase conversions by reducing the number of steps required to reach the desired page.

If you can increase your SEO and usability, and possibly improve your conversion rate, would it make sense to add breadcrumbs to your nav?

Benefits for SEO:

There are 4 primary benefits of adding a breadcrumb navigation:

1. Create Additional Links – breadcrumbs create more links to every page that is included in the trail.   Internal links have value, so the more legitimate internal links you create, the more your pages’ internal link value will grow.
2. Prioritizes your pages – breadcrumb navigation sends additional link value to your highest level pages – because your breadcrumbs are laid out in a heirarchy, your top level pages will receive more links than the sub pages.  This helps build your total internal links to your highest value pages.
3. Increase Crawling Frequency and Breadth – Ensures that your highest value pages are getting crawled – When a page of your blog or website gets spidered, the bot will follow the links on the page.  Since there can be an endless # of links on any given page, the bot gives the highest priority to the links at the top of the page.   Breadcrumbs are usually included right below the main horizontal nav menu, so it’s very likely that they will be followed by the spider = your pages get indexed more thoroughly, and more often.
4. Keyword Based Anchor Text – Probably the biggest benefit for your sites SEO is the inclusion of keyword based anchor text.   Assuming that your categories and pages are named after their top level keywords, your breadcrumb navigation will also include those targeted keywords.  By simply adding a breadcrumb navigation, you’re automatically creating keyword based links to your highest value pages, thus helping them to rank higher for those terms.

If you’re using Thesis, adding breadcrumbs to your navigation will take about 30 seconds.  Seriously…

Go to Greg Rickabys post How to Add Breadcrumbs Without a Plugin.  Cut and paste and you’ll be done in under one minute.

Step 1: Open custom_functions.php and paste the following code at the bottom:

// Build Breadcrumbs
function the_crumbs() {
	if (!is_home()) {
		echo '<a href="';
		echo get_option('home');
		echo '">';
		echo 'Home'; // Home Link Text, change this to meet your needs
		echo "</a> >> ";
		if (is_category() || is_single()) {
			the_category('title_li=');
			if (is_single()) {
				echo " >> ";
				the_title();
			}
		} elseif (is_page()) {
			echo the_title();
}}}

// Show Breadcrumbs
function show_crumbs() { ?>
<div id="crumbs">
	<?php the_crumbs(); ?>
</div>
<?php }
add_action('thesis_hook_before_content','show_crumbs');

Step 2: Open custom.css and paste the following:

/* Breadcrumbs */
#crumbs {
	font-size: 11px; /*font size, change this to whatever you want*/
	padding: 10px 0px 0px 10px; /*10 padding top, 10 padding left*/
}
#crumbs a {
	color: #00F /*change this to whatever color you want*/
}
#crumbs a:hover {
	text-decoration: underline; /*underline the links on a mouse over*/
}

Could it possibly be any easier?  Go try it and look for breadcrumbs in the search results for your domain.

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Tagged as: Breadcrumb, CSS, Hansel & Gretel, PHP, Thesis, Thesis Customization