Breadcrumbs in SEO
Breadcrumbs play an important role when it comes to user experience for any website. So today let’s try to understand the anatomy of the same in detail.
- What is Breadcrumbs in SEO
- Types of Breadcrumbs
- Benefits of Breadcrumbs in SEO
- How to Implement breadcrumbs
What is Breadcrumbs in SEO?
It informs us how far are you from the home page, it is used for user navigation. With the help of breadcrumbs users can easily navigate from the place they have entered to the destination pages. It also helps search engines to understand the hierarchical structure of a website and the path leading to the current page.
Example of Breadcrumbs:
In the above example we can see red coloured highlighted items are called breadcrumbs. Users can easily navigate to previous or next step breadcrumbs by simply clicking on them.
Types of Breadcrumbs?
Take a look at different types of breadcrumbs available and its usages in real time.
- Hierarchy-Based Breadcrumbs: Mainly used to represent a site’s hierarchical structure, and also used for categories and subcategories.
- Attribute-Based Breadcrumbs: It is used to display the characteristics of a particular landing page.
- Path-Based Breadcrumbs: It is used to display the user’s path from the homepage to the current page they are in.
Benefits of Breadcrumbs in SEO?
There are some useful and meaningful benefits of implementing breadcrumbs for our website
- User Experience: without any doubt breadcrumbs definitely contribute to a positive user experience
- Improve site navigation: users can navigate different pages across your site.
- Contextual information: Both users and search engines can easily find the content information due to hierarchical structure.
How to Implement Breadcrumbs?
Take a look at some of the most commonly used practices to implement breadcrumbs for websites. Note: Please consult your web developer before you install these codes, it is always recommended that these codes should be implemented by an experienced developer.
1. HTML Structure:
<div id=”breadcrumbs”>
<ul>
<li><a href=”/”>Home</a></li>
<li><a href=”/category/”>Category</a></li>
<li><a href=”/category/subcategory/”>Subcategory</a></li>
<li>Current Page</li>
</ul>
</div>
2. CSS Styling :
#breadcrumbs {
margin: 10px 0;
}
#breadcrumbs ul {
list-style: none;
padding: 0;
margin: 0;
}
#breadcrumbs li {
display: inline;
margin-right: 5px;
}
#breadcrumbs a {
text-decoration: none;
color: #3498db;
}
#breadcrumbs a:hover {
text-decoration: underline;
}
3. Dynamic Breadcrumbs:
If your website or application has dynamic content and the breadcrumb trail needs to change based on the current page, you’ll need a way to generate the breadcrumbs dynamically. This can be done using server-side or client-side scripting, depending on your technology stack.
Example in PHP:
<div id=”breadcrumbs”>
<ul>
<li><a href=”/”>Home</a></li>
<?php
$urlParts = explode(‘/’, $_SERVER[‘REQUEST_URI’]);
$url = ‘/’;
foreach ($urlParts as $part) {
if (!empty($part)) {
$url .= $part . ‘/’;
echo ‘<li><a href=”‘ . $url . ‘”>’ . ucfirst($part) . ‘</a></li>’;
}
}
?>
<li><?php echo ucfirst(basename($_SERVER[‘REQUEST_URI’])); ?></li>
</ul>
</div>
Conclusion
In our final words, breadcrumbs play an important role when it comes to better user experience of a website. So pay attention and implement the same to grab its benefits.
